Sanders R J
J Comp Psychol. 1985 Jun;99(2):197-210.
Fifteen videotaped conversations of a chimpanzee signing with his trainers were examined in order to determine (a) whether the ape was using imitation to learn about new language forms as some human children do and (b) whether the ape's nonimitative utterances implied knowledge of linguistic structures. The answers to both questions were negative. The evidence suggests that the utterances lacked the semantic and syntactic organization found in the utterances of most children. Instead of learning to use signs as symbols for communicating propositional messages, the ape learned to use gestures as nonsymbolic instrumental responses under the stimulus control of objects in the signing context and verbal and nonverbal cues from the trainers. Other research now underway with chimpanzees may eventually reveal whether this performance is characteristic of chimpanzees in general or is the result of particular training strategies used to teach language to chimpanzees.
(a) 这只猿是否像一些人类儿童那样通过模仿来学习新的语言形式；(b) 这只猿的非模仿性发声是否暗示了其对语言结构的了解，研究人员检查了一只黑猩猩与训练师进行手语交流的15段录像对话。两个问题的答案均为否定。证据表明，这些发声缺乏大多数儿童发声中所具有的语义和句法组织。这只猿没有学会将手语用作传达命题信息的符号，而是学会了在手语情境中物体的刺激控制以及训练师的言语和非言语线索的影响下，把手势用作非符号化的工具性反应。目前正在对黑猩猩进行的其他研究最终可能会揭示这种表现是黑猩猩的普遍特征，还是用于向黑猩猩教授语言的特定训练策略的结果。
