Language Comprehension in Ape and Child: Evolutionary Implications

Summary

Previous investigations of the linguistic capacities of apes have focused upon the ape’s ability to produce words with little concern for comprehension. By contrast, it is increasingly recognized that comprehension precedes production in the language development of normal human children (Golinkoff et al. 1987), and indeed may guide production. The study discussed in this chapter systematically compared the language comprehension skills of a 2-year-old child and a 9-year-old bonobo (Pan paniscus) by testing their comprehension of 660 novel sentences. Both subjects were exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy and neither was trained to comprehend speech. All language acquisition was through observational learning. The results indicated that both subjects comprehended novel requests and simple syntactical devices. The bonobo decoded the syntactical devices of word order and recursion with higher accuracy than the child; however, the child performed better than the bonobo on the conjunctive, a structure which places a greater burden on short-term memory.