Word: rumbaugh
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...1/2-year-old child and a taste for movies about cavemen. The 12-year-old pygmy chimpanzee lives with a colony of other apes in a cage complex on the wooded campus of the Georgia State University Language Research Center, near Atlanta. Under the tutelage of psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, he makes his desires known either by pointing to symbols printed on a laminated board or by punching the symbols on a special keyboard that then generates the words in English. While Kanzi cannot speak (apes lack the vocal control to form words), he understands spoken language...
...time-honored fashion of ambitious young interns, Kanzi became involved in language experiments by catching the boss's eye. Savage-Rumbaugh noticed that the young ape was learning words she was struggling to teach his mother Matata. The language was a system of abstract visual symbols developed by Savage-Rumbaugh's husband Duane Rumbaugh during his first language experiments with chimpanzees. "If Kanzi could learn without instruction, I wondered, Why teach?" says Savage-Rumbaugh. From then on, Kanzi learned language much the way human children do: by going through the ordinary activities of his day while humans spoke in English...
Kanzi's most noteworthy achievement has been to demonstrate a grasp of grammatical concepts such as word order. Savage-Rumbaugh and psychologist Rose Sevcik created an extended experiment to compare the ape with a two-year-old girl named Alia in responding to commands expressed in 660 spoken English sentences. The sentences combined objects in ways that Kanzi and Alia were unlikely to have encountered before: "Put the melon in the potty," or "Go get the carrot that's in the microwave...
Meese's remarks were a response to the state of Texas' execution in September of Charles Rumbaugh Jr., who robbed and killed an Amarillo jeweller in 1975 at the tender age of 17. Rumbaugh's death by lethal injection was the first execution since 1964 of someone sentenced as a minor. Last month, Rumbaugh was succeeded by South Carolina's Terry Roach, who was convicted--also at the age of 17--for criminal sexual assault and two counts of murder. Thirty-one other death-row convicts await capital punishment for crimes committed before the age of legal maturity. Sixteen...
...dropping them on hard surfaces, flying low when their target is small. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, chimpanzees have been conditioned to communicate through symbols and are able to distinguish between signs that mean food and those that refer to nonedible items. Says Duane Rumbaugh: "Apes have the capacity to use symbols that represent things not present in time and space-the essence of semantics, in human parlance." The chimps also have demonstrated self-awareness. One, while watching itself on a television monitor, directed a flashlight beam into its mouth, apparently curious about what its throat...