Signs of intelligence in cross-fostered chimpanzees

Abstract

In cross-fostering, the young of one species are reared by adults of another, as in the classical ethological studies of imprinting and song-learning. In our laboratory, infant chimpanzees were reared under human conditions that included two-way communication in American Sign Language (A.S.L.), the gestural language of the deaf in North America. A large body of evidence from five chimpanzees demonstrated stage by stage replication of basic aspects of the acquisition of speech and signs by hearing and deaf children. Here we review evidence that, under double-blind conditions: (i) the chimpanzees communicated information in A.S.L. to human observers; (ii) independent human observers agreed in their identification of the chimpanzee signs, (iii) the chimpanzees could use the signs to refer to natural language categories: DOG for any dog, FLOWER for any flower, SHOE for any shoe.