A Young Chimpanzee’s Growth and Development

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.

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.

 

(c) 2008 Aya Katz

 The Comments on the Original Article

  21 comments

mistyhorizon2003 profile image

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

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

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 4 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Mistyhorizon, thanks for the input!

Karen N profile image

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 profile image

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.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Shadesbreath, it’s never too late to join the party. Thanks for dropping by!

joyride profile image

joyride 3 years ago

Where is Bow living now, and how long are you planning to keep him?? Where would he be living after he leaves your family, with other chimps in an animal park in the Us, or in a chimp refuge in Africa, and where did Bow come from?? I assume that not many people live with chimpanzees in their homes, kelly ann

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Kelly Ann, Bow is still living in my home, although he does not have complete free run of the place at the moment. In the future, when he grows older, I hope to dedicate a five acre tract adjoining my house to his use, and I plan to build an island there, with a tunnel leading from the island back to the pens in my house.

Bow also needs companions of his own kind, and he constantly asks me to get him a girl friend. (He hasn’t yet gone through puberty, but he’s already very interested in this aspect of life.)

I honor Bow’s right to lead a full life, and it is my hope to be able to provide him with everything he needs as he matures.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

My dreams for Bow’s future, and his own hopes, of course rest on being able to raise the money necessary to make all this come to pass.

Mr Nice profile image

Mr Nice 3 years ago from North AmericaLevel 1 Commenter

Wow it’s amazing chimps hoing through evolution process again. I mean future humans.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Mr. Nice, thanks for dropping by. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but what we’re doing here isn’t quite as big as what you suggest. This isn’t evolution. Evolution is a process of natural selection that requires many, many generations to unfold. Bow’s enculturation is not a genetic development. It’s the same process that all children go through as they find their place in their family and their community.

Mr Nice profile image

Mr Nice 3 years ago from North AmericaLevel 1 Commenter

Shalom, Mashlam Kha Aya, thanks for the detailed feedback for my comments. I understand evolution process is slow and long but I don’t believe our ancestors were chimps. That’s why I was just kidding. But it is amazing and it’s all because of your love and hard work bow learned so much. Do you remember Alex the African Grey parrot ? He died in 2007. Alex parrot worked with US scientists for 30 years. He was able to count to six, identify colors and even express frustration with repetitive scientific trials.

Alex’s advanced language and recognition skills revolutionized the understanding of the avian brain.

Alex was amazing too, I believe every thing is possible & you prove it. Are you looking for a girl friend for Bow on hubpages.:) My Love for Bow & keep up the good work.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Mr. Nice, you’re quite right. Humans are not descended from chimpanzees (or vice versa.) Yes, I’m familiar with Alex and his achievements. I was really saddened to hear of his death in 2007.

Mr Nice profile image

Mr Nice 3 years ago from North AmericaLevel 1 Commenter

Shalom Aya, I think & feel the same way too. Alex death was really sad.

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Mr. Nice, yes it was very sad. I had been at a conference on animal language that summer, and I met Irene Pepperberg, who gave a talk about Alex. Alex was still young by African Grey standards. His death was unexpected. Many mourned.

Diane in Atlanta profile image

Diane in Atlanta 3 years ago from Atlanta, Georgia

Aya, I came to visit your site and see that you have a number of very interesting hubs. I look forward to continuing to read about Bow and your other topics!

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 3 years ago from The OzarksHub Author

Hi, Diane. Thanks for dropping by! Glad you liked this hub, and hope you go on to the next one that covers Bow’s further development.

Kind Regards profile image

Kind Regards 21 months ago from Missouri Ozarks – Table Rock Lake

Aya Katz, It’s nice to catch up on your Hubs. You can expect to keep seeing comments from me. I learned so much from reading this that I wouldn’t even know where to start. I appreciate your great ease with writing. I just start reading your words and never want to stop. I’m curious if you’ve ever been to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines. Kind Regards

Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 21 months ago from The OzarksHub Author

Kind Regards, thanks so much for the heartfelt comments! Yes, I have been to the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. I even gave a talk there.

DTR0005 profile image

DTR0005 19 months ago from Midwest

Perhaps I haven’t read far enough, but were you ever able to solve the problem for Bow in terms of being able to express past and/or future events using lexigrams? Would something akin to Chinese “particles” possibly do the trick or is a sense of future, past, or even a hypothetical event best serviced with terms suck as “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” maybe,” etc. ?

Another quick question. I assume Bow can create at least some”original” sentences and if that is the case, are his constructions consistant time and again, has he invented his own unique idioms?

  • Aya Katz profile image

Aya Katz 19 months ago from The OzarksHub Author

DTR0005, you need to read a little further in the series to get a complete answer to your question. Bow acquired literacy, and the moment he had that, he also had grammar. It was the lexigrams that were holding him back; he had actually mastered grammar long before, but had no way of expressing it till he could spell.

        

About Aya Katz

Aya Katz is the administrator of Pubwages. When she is not busy administering, she sometimes also writes posts like a regular user.
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2 Responses to A Young Chimpanzee’s Growth and Development

  1. Sweetbearies says:

    I think it would have been great to grow up bilingual or trilingual. I really need to practice Spanish and French more often, but this just comes a bit more naturally if you grow up doing it from the start.

    • Aya Katz says:

      Sweetbearies, if you grow up speaking more than one language, you don’t have to even think about it. It permanently changes the way your organize your brain.

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