Use the keyboard merely in a stumbling second-language fashion

Another problem implicit in the keyboard has to do with the fact that

apes’ social life is high-speed performance.They normally detect and

negotiate social events quicker than humans do. Using the slow

medium of keyboard-talk is therefore sometimes a frustrating affair for

them, especially when they talk with humans who are not skilled key-

board users. It is time-consuming to sort out misunderstandings and

repair mistakes, and sometimes communications are so slow that other

events take the attention away from what is laboriously being commu-

nicated. A clear advantage with the keyboard, however, is that it is easy

for non-members of the culture to perceive linguistic communication

in the apes’ behaviour. But those of us who understand bonobo speech

tend more and more to use the keyboard only when we are forced to.

Simply speaking is more efficient and in harmony with the rhythm and

social life in which we find it natural to negotiate the events of daily

life.When the keyboard does not tie together only two members at a

time, it becomes natural for the entire Pan/Homo group to talk. There

is, in conclusion, a pressure within the Pan/Homo culture towards vocal

speech.

p. 54 - on full language:

That linguistic creativity is a cultural rather than a grammatical trait

turns the edge of Wallman’s (1992) and Pinker’s (1994) critical remark

that the chimpanzees Nim and Washoe cannot possibly have learned

ASL, because ASL is a full language, and no ape has acquired a full lan-

guage. Their notion of full languages presupposes that languages exist

as grammatical systems. Not only does Kanzi’s language acquisition and

use speak against this picture, so does our human language acquisition

and use, if viewed closely.

Science, and Terrace

P 99-100

Let us summarize how we consider our work and its reception. We

have, in our research practices, carefully balanced the specialized sci-

entific techniques that we learned as university students against the

more general aspects of human life that we developed during childhood

immaturity. Counterproductive demands on what it means to do sci-

entific research and report results have made it almost impossible to

communicate what happened at the LRC (or in Project Nim, as we shall

see later in this chapter). Therefore, this unusual event has not been

allowed to work as a sufficient reason to change the way sciences such

as linguistics, psychology and biology understand their objects of study.

p. 149:

It is significant that Terrace was quite optimistic during the entire

project period, and noted daily linguistic interactions with Nim, but

decided that the project had failed only by the end of the last year, when

he was sitting in front of a TV-screen watching videotapes and writing

a scientific assessment of the project. We do not doubt that Nim tended

to mirror the teacher’s signs, but are not surprised that he did so. That

was the main kind of practice with signs he was taught in the class-

room. The teacher invited Nim to make the same signs she made, often

by moulding Nim’s hands, and he was met with affection when he did

the same signs the teacher made. Repeating the teacher’s signs must

have been an important form of interaction for Nim, a way of being

together with humans and receiving their attention and affection. This

may not have been an impressive form of linguistic interaction, but Nim

used signing also outside of the classroom, in situations where he seems

to have had something to say. And the humans did not only invite Nim

to mirror their signs, they also used signs when they had something to

say to him. These freer interactions must have affected Nim and made

him familiar with at least some of the cultural practices in which human

children begin to speak. Perhaps Herb Terrace in this respect can be

compared with some of the sceptical caregivers who worked with Kanzi,

who talked with him and told us what he said, but questioned the lin-

guistic nature of these communications when they acted in another

culture than the one in which Kanzi just recently had spoken to them.

On underreporting and more on Terrace duality (idea vs impl)

p. 150-151:

Terrace’s original idea was not that he would teach Nim language in

a tiny classroom. He explicitly rejected the dissociation of language from

social context that characterized earlier ape language research:

My plan for teaching Nim to use sign language called for raising him

as a human child in a human family . . . I hoped that Nim’s motiva-

tion to sign would be similar to a child’s motivation to talk: not just

to communicate his feelings and desires, but to please his family and

to share his perceptions of the world. (Terrace 1979: 5)

Terrace here expresses his intention to place an important component

of the project outside of the controlled sphere that he mastered as a

remarkably skilled experimental psychologist. He expresses his hunch

that in order to transfer language to Nim, he had to temporarily suspend

experimental psychology, and leave an essential part of the project to

what might hopefully happen between Nim and a few humans with

whom he would live. Terrace expresses the need to exercise epokhé in

Project Nim, also when describing vital aspects of the project:

Because of their subjective nature, important details of Nim’s social-

ization cannot be described properly in the objective terminology of

the ‘method’ section of a scientific article. They require an under-

standing of the human setting of the experiment, of the people who

took part in it and the places in which they worked. They also require

some understanding of Nim’s personality, as elusive and complicated

as that of any human child. (Terrace 1979: 5)

In this valuable remark on the nature of ape language research, Terrace

touches what we call culture. Nim is an autobiography that describes

four years of Herb Terrace and Nim’s lives together. It is noteworthy that