PSY 2012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: B. F. Skinner, Language Acquisition Device, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Animals do not have the appropriate vocal apparatus to acquire human speech. Speech is not the only way to use language, there are many more examples including writing. Asl: american sign language is a complex language of hand gestures and facial expressions used by thousands of deaf people in the united states. First study done by allen & beatrice gardner; who worked with a chimp named washoe to try to train chimps to use a non-oral human language. Sue savage-rumbaugh had a research done with bonobos that have been trained to communicate with their care takers by touching geometric symbols that represent words on a computer-monitored keyboard. They acquired hundreds of words and used them in many combinations, that showed to be spontaneous and showed to be following the rules because they had to differentiate between symbol combinations. Kanzi carried out 475 out of 660 of the requests of sentences which showed that he understood.
