![]() ![]() Two people accompany Kanzi and Mulika constantly from morning to night. Anatomically unable, like all apes, to pronounce words, Kanzi uses the keyboard to say where he wants to go, what he wants to eat and what games he wants to play. Locations throughout the estate such as the treehouse, the trailer and the ''mushroom path'' have all been assigned symbols. Kanzi has great freedom to roam the grounds of the institute, which is jointly administered by Georgia State University and the Yerkes primate center of Emory University. To meet these varied goals, the Atlanta scientists have tried to create a world that is half human, half more natural for an ape. Equally important, the routine would have to yield precise documentation of the apes' achievements if they were to be accepted by a skeptical scientific community. The challenge was to provide Kanzi, and more recently Mulika too, with a milieu that would encourage spontaneity but also stimulate linguistic skills that do not appear naturally. As they later described it, ''the focus of the research would be upon what, if anything, Kanzi would learn by observing the way in which others used the symbols around him.'' But helping a young pygmy chimpanzee make scientific history is no simple task. Instead of building vocabulary through structured training sessions with food rewards, they decided to see if Kanzi could learn language the way a child does. The scientists scrapped their existing research plan. Common chimpanzees had mastered symbols only after long and arduous training. In the world of ape linguistics, these were brilliant feats. He punched the symbol for ''ball'' and pointed to a ball. He hit the sign for apple, then proved he knew what he was saying by picking an apple from an assortment of foods. When Kanzi was two and a half, his mother was taken away for breeding, and he suddenly revealed, to the scientists' amazement, that he had been learning symbols out of the corner of his eye. But baby Kanzi's strongest indications of interest in the symbols, the teachers thought, were the many times he took ''great joy in interrupting his mother's training sessions by slapping haphazardly at the keys.'' ![]() The researchers already suspected that pygmy chimpanzees were more intelligent than common chimpanzees, a different species they had worked with for years. The animals' frequent requests to be groomed or hugged, a visitor soon senses, help stoke the spirits of the researchers as much as they reassure the apes.Īs an infant, Kanzi played in the laboratory while scientists taught symbols to his mother, Matata, a wild-born animal regarded as past the prime age for learning language. They note every act of symbolic communication for the scientific record. Throughout the long days of roving and play, of purposeful journeys and aimless puttering, the teachers try to remain cheerful and alert. ''He'd like to have boys around to play tackle football.'' Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the research leader. ''In his motor skills and his interest in competitive games, he's like a 7- or 8-year-old boy,'' said E. He drags his companions to all corners of the forested estate, over hills and through a mosquito-infested swamp. As he roams the center's 55-acre property, Kanzi again and again asks his teachers to play energetic games of tag and hide-and-seek, ''talking'' with them on a keyboard filled with geometric symbols that stand for words. Like children, the young apes demand constant attention. Tending a precocious ape, it becomes clear in the course of a typical day at the Language Research Center near Atlanta, requires the limitless patience of a model parent. He is not above giving her a sharp pinch. Kanzi, who researchers say has shown the most advanced linguistic abilities ever documented in an animal, gets jealous when people shift their attention to Mulika, his infant half-sister. If his human companion suggests walking to the treehouse, he will invariably insist, punching symbols on a keyboard, on going somewhere else. THE 4-year-old pygmy chimpanzee named Kanzi has entered an exasperating ''contrary'' phase.
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