Gardner And Gardner (1969) Aim And Context

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Context 1

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We could use the criteria developed by the linguist Charles Hockett (1960). These ‘design features of language’ are 13 characteristics that distinguish human language from animal communication. Many of these design features are found in animal communication, but only human language displays all of the features. An example of one of these design features is ‘interchangeability’ which is the ability to send and receive messages.

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Study 1 – Hayes and Hayes (1952) worked extensively with a chimpanzee called Vicki. They aimed to teach her to produce a vocal language, but in their six years of working with Vicki, she was only able to make four sounds that approximated to English words – mama, papa, cup and up. From this we could conclude that chimpanzees have very limited language ability.

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Study 2 – Premack and Premack (1966) raised a chimpanzee, Sarah, and taught her to use different coloured and shaped chips to represent words. She placed these on a board to make sentences. By the end, she had acquired 130 signs and could make sentences of up to eight units long. From this we could conclude that the language ability of chimps is a great deal more developed than previous research such as Hayes and Hayes. This may be due to the fact that chimps have difficulty producing vocal words and using a manual system allowed them to display their ability better.

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Aim

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Gardner and Gardner aimed to investigate if they could teach a chimpanzee to communicate using a human language, specifically American Sign Language (ASL). Their intention was to raise the chimpanzee in the same way that a child is raised, so that language would be acquired naturally. They decided to use a chimpanzee because the species is highly intelligent, very sociable and known for its strong attachments to humans. ASL was used because it is based on hand signing, as previous evidence suggested that chimpanzees would have difficulty using their vocal apparatus. Secondly, chimpanzees are good with their hands, which meant they should cope well with the mechanics of signing.