Bow’s Development

[This article was first published on Hubpages in 2008 as “Bow’s Development”. It has been deemed idle and is now republished under a different title on PubWages.]

First Meeting With Bow

When my daughter Sword and I first met Bow, Sword was two and a half years old, and we had been told that a baby boy was available for us to adopt. At the time, I was thinking more in terms of adopting a little girl chimp, because I was aware that chimpanzees become much stronger than humans when they are not yet grown. However, I was assured that there was no significant difference between chimpanzee males and females in terms of intelligence, and that if anything, the females can get a bit more tempermental if you try to correct them. Nobody likes to be told they are wrong, and females take it worse than males. That is, males reconcile faster. Females sulk longer.

Bow, like all babies, chimpanzee and human alike, was adorable. I was gazing into his sweet face when I was suddenly aware that I was being hugged by a much larger chimpanzee, who had materialized out of nowhere.

It was Conor, and he was eight years old. He was perfectly friendly with both me and Sword, although he wanted to remove Sword’s shoes and the little ornaments in her hair. He was very gentle with her, but also very curious.

We had passed our first test as a family wanting to adopt a chimpanzee. Everybody likes babies, but we had to prove that we would not be daunted by a meeting with a juvenile, something Bow would one day become.

Sword and Bow on Bow’s First Day Home

When Bow came to live with us, he was a little over a month old. While he could support his entire weight from birth, he still was not crawling, and when I wasn’t bottle feeding him, burping him, changing his diapers and cuddling him, he spent the majority of his time asleep in a bassinet.

Sword was not used to sharing me with another child, and there were flare-ups of sibling rivalry. However, there were also moments of genuine affection between siblings.

At this point no special effort was made to teach Bow language. It was a situation of total immersion. Sword and I spoke Hebrew to each other and to Bow. People in the community where we lived spoke English. Bow was exposed to both languages, but the dominant language in the household was Hebrew, and it was in Hebrew that he eventually became most fluent.

Bow asleep in his bassinet

Bow crawling

Bow was born in February of 2002. By June of 2002, he had begun to crawl. We had guests in the household at the time. My friend June and her daughter Delight came for a summer visit. Thus another language was introduced into the household. June and Delight spoke Chinese (Mandarin) to each other. Sword and I spoke Hebrew to each other and to Bow. And when we wanted to communicate with June and Delight, we all spoke English.

It was my hope that Bow would be the first trilingual chimpanzee. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. June and Delight had to leave at the end of the summer, and although they came for another extended visit in 2003, we were not able to find Chinese speakers to keep up with Bow in the years that followed.

Eventually, we had to drop Chinese as one of Bow’s languages, and we stuck to the languages that Sword and I could speak: Hebrew and English.

Lexigrams

Chimpanzees have an undescended larynx, and they find it very difficult to produce the speech sounds of human languages. A number of different methods have been devised over the years to get around this problem, most notably, the use of ASL (American Sign Language) and Lexigrams.

Examples of chimpanzee language studies that used ASL include the Gardners’ and later Fout’s work with Washoe and Herbert Terrace’s project with Nim Chimpsky. There are even gorillas that use ASL: see the link below to Francine Patterson’s site for Koko.

The advantages of ASL are:

(1) It’s an existing language used by the deaf community;

(2) A chimpanzee can be encouraged to produce a sign by a method called moulding that allows a human to shape the chimp’s hands into an approximation of the sign;

(3) No special technology is necessary for ASL.

The disadvantages of using ASL for chimpanzee communication are as follows:

(1) ASL is a language spoken by deaf individuals; One can’t become truly fluent in ASL without a process of immersion. ASL is not a form of English or any other spoken language. Most chimpanzee language researchers are not fluent speakers of ASL. Because of this, they are not competent to teach ASL to anybody, least of all a non-human.

(2) The gestures of ASL are difficult for a chimpanzee to learn because the chimpanzee hand and the human hand are not designed for exactly the same motions. True ASL speakers who have observed chimpanzee signing have complained that it isn’t accurate.

(3) Chimpanzees sign faster than most humans can see. If you are not fluent in ASL — and even if you are — you are going to miss a lot of what the chimp says.

An alternative method, pioneered by Duane Rumbaugh with Lana, and perfected by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh with the bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha and their families, is to use lexigrams — abstract printed symbols to stand for words. Most lexigrams bear no relationship to either the meaning or the pronunciation of the words for which they stand. However, lexigrams stand not for ideas, but for words in a particular language. So, for instance, when Kanzi presses one of the lexigrams in his keyboard, he is selecting a particular English word for which it stands. Kanzi and Panbanisha are fluent in English, and their use of lexigrams permits them to communicate in English.

The advantages of a lexigrammatic system such as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh uses with her bonobos are:

(1) The spoken language that the researchers use can be represented by lexigrams; thus fluency for comprehension that the bonobos may have acquired by daily interactions with caregivers can be translated into fluency in production, using a lexigram keyboard. Neither researchers nor apes have to acquire a whole new language in order to communicate with each other.

(2) There is no special dexterity required. Lexigrams can be selected by pointing at a printed sheet or by pressing a key on the keyboard.

The disadvantage of lexigrams, as used by other researchers, are:

(1) The apes are limited to the symbols on the keyboard. If they want to use a word they know, but have no lexigram for, they are stuck.

(2) If used with an inflectional language, such as English, lexigrams limit the ability to speak grammatically. For instance, if you have a lexigram for sing, you can’ t use sangor sung, so you end speaking ungrammatically.

(3) Nobody but the researchers and the apes know the special symbols on the lexigram keyboard. This limits the ability to communicate with strangers, or to surf on the internet.

When I adopted the lexigram system for Project Bow I wanted the best of both worlds. I wanted a standard system of communication. I wanted to be able to speak with Bow in languages I am fluent in. And I wanted him to eventually have unlimited access to any word he wanted, in any grammatical form. This is why I chose to make our lexigrams in the standard orthography of each language.

What does this mean? It means that lexigrams that stand for English words look like English words. Lexigrams that stand for Hebrew words look like Hebrew words. Bow wasn’t required to think of the lexigrams as being composed of letters. He could just memorize each of them as a whole symbol. But the information was there. It left him free to communicate immediately with new friends as well as people he had known all his life. And it paved the way for true literacy.

The design of Bow’s lexigrams is one of my major contributions to the field of ape language research.

Examples of Bow’s Lexigrams in English and Hebrew

Internship Program; Floortime

When Bow was an infant, he was well in advance of human infants his own age. He was aware of his surroundings; he understood social events that a human infant of the same age would not have; he was very easy to care for.

As Bow grew older, the comparison was not always so favorable. He was hyperactive. He had poor impulse control. He had a tendency to destroy objects. And though he recognized lexigrams and could use them to request what he wanted, for quite some time he did not show any desire to communicate verbally beyond a one word request for a tickle, a chase, a banana or a hug. By the time he was three years old, it seemed clear that he was behind most human children in his linguistic accomplishments.

This is the point at which many researchers give up. Between three years and four years of age, a chimpanzee becomes difficult to care for. Without constant supervision, they cause extreme havoc. Even with constant supervision, all sorts of mishaps occur. Washoe left the Gardners at about that age and returned to Oklahoma accompanied by Roger Fouts. At about that age, Herbert Terrace sent Nim Chimpsky back to the Lemmon farm. The road gets very difficult at that point, but there are great things just around the corner.

I did not give up. Instead, I redoubled my efforts. I started an internship program that allowed young college graduates to learn more about chimpanzees, and in turn these volunteers helped me and Bow cope with our twenty-four hour commitment to each other.

In addition, I introduced DIR Floortime into Project Bow. Floortime is a method of interacting with developmentally challenged children that was devised by Dr. Stanley Greenspan. If you want to learn more about it, please follow the link.

http://www.floortime.org/ft.php?page=Our%20Approach

Bow in the Summer of 2007

Bow’s English Lexigram Vocabulary in Summer of 2007

By the summer of 2007, Bow had an English vocabulary of 238 lexigrams, shown above, and a Hebrew vocabulary of 137 lexigrams, as shown below. Though he knew fewer words in Hebrew, he knew them better. He was like many bilingual children whose home language vocabulary was learned from a small number of familiar people. The outsiders brought many English words with them, but they were used less often. The insiders functioned in a limited realm, where everything was understood.

Bow’s Hebrew Lexigram Vocabulary in Summer 2007

At the beginning of the summer of 2007, Bow was still at the one word stage. By the end of the summer, he had begun on a series of astounding advances in his linguistic development. They involved spontaneity, literacy and grammar.

But this has been a really long hub. So I’ll tell you more about it some other time. Bow says it’s a good place to stop.

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The Comments on the Original Article

21 comments

mistyhorizon2003 4 years ago from Guernsey (Channel Islands)Level 7 Commenter

Really fascinating. I am looking forward to the next instalment.

Aya Katz 4 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Mistyhorizon, thanks for the input!

Karen N 4 years ago from United States

Really good article, Bow is so cute in his baby pictures.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 4 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Thanks for your comment, Karen.

Shadesbreath 3 years ago from CaliforniaLevel 5 Commenter

I just found this. Sorry I’m so late to the party. This is fantastic reading. I’m headed to the next one.