TORONTO, August 4, 1998 -- York University professor Stuart Shanker is attracting world wide attention for his ground-breaking, controversial book that proves apes can develop the same language capability as a human child.

Researchers who are working to learn more about language in autistic and mentally handicapped children are among those applauding the findings of Apes, Language, and the Human Mind.

"We are no longer just studying apes," said Shanker, who co-authored the book with two American researchers, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Talbot Taylor. "We are also working with other colleagues using these same techniques with autistic kids to figure out what sensory or processing problems are blocking certain interactions in their development, and how we might circumvent this."

For the past 20 years, Savage-Rumbaugh, a biologist and psychologist at Georgia State University's Language Research Center, studied the language capability of bonobos, a species of ape closely resembling chimpanzees. Although bonobos lack vocal cords, she found they can learn to communicate using a lexigram board. The board uses pictorial symbols that produce words and sentences when the appropriate buttons are pressed. The symbols on the board do not correlate visually to the object they represent.

Shanker and Taylor, a linguist at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, began working closely with Savage-Rumbaugh six years ago. The team's research revealed that the apes are capable of far more than just pointing to the symbols representing things they want. The team found that bonobos can express ideas almost as well as any human baby or toddler using the lexigram board. Kanzi, one of the bonobos they've studied, can "use language for other reasons than just to get food or attention," said Shanker. "Kanzi uses words in social interactions to do very human-like things in very human-like ways."

For instance, one of the psychologists spoke on the telephone to Kanzi, and said she would visit him the next day and bring him a "surprise." The psychologist asked Kanzi what kind of a surprise he wanted, and the bonobo pushed the button for "M & Ms" candy. Sure enough, when the psychologist arrived the next day, Kanzi pushed the button for "surprise." Kanzi had shown an aptitude for language, plus a capacity for memory. Kanzi also understood and responded to instructions in the form of a compound sentence such as "Go and get the ball that's outside and put it in the fridge."

According to the authors, Kanzi and other bonobos can understand simple grammatical structures containing subject, object, and verb. They can also understand word order or syntax and what we call inflectional endings, like ing, ed, or s.

While researchers are hailing the unprecedented findings, the book is also generating its share of controversy, most notably from disciples of world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky.

"Chomsky believes that only humans have that innate capacity for language," says Shanker. "On the contrary, our research team believes that language only develops when one is raised by caregivers who use language when interacting with an infant. We are emphasizing the role of the environment and socialization in language development."

Published by New York's Oxford University Press, Apes, Language and the Human Mind was initially listed at the back of an academic catalogue. The New York Times found the book and published an article, creating a flurry of interest. The publisher received so many advance orders that the book sold out, before it was even published.

Apes, Language, and the Human Mind attracted the attention of Stanley Greenspan, a renowned developmental psychiatrist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Greenspan and Shanker will apply the same linguistic principles to autistic children, looking at the factors that lead to impaired language and possible ways of improving their linguistic skills.

Shanker has also received a three-year, $27,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to examine language acquisition in both normal and abnormal contexts in apes and humans. It will result in a book called The Landscape of Language: An Interactionist Perspective, to be published by Sage Publishing sometime in the next few years.

Shanker is available for interviews on Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, and his other new book, Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of AI (Artificial Intelligence), published by Routledge -- as well as his upcoming projects.

For more information, please contact:

Stuart Shanker
Professor of Philosophy/Psychology
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 66464
Home: (416) 481-5680
email: shanker@yorku.ca

Ken Turriff
Media Relations Officer
York University
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22086
email: kturriff@yorku.ca
YU/051/98