Language and Communication

“I once spoke to Keith Hayes about Viki and remarked, ‘History often portrays your efforts to raise Viki as a failed animal language project, which is unfair because that wasn't the purpose of your research.’ Keith replied, ‘I think that’s my fault: the only differences we could find between Viki and normal children were in her language abilities. So those differences, and not the many similarities we found, became the ‘contribution’ of our project.’ Hopefully you will perceive the many other advances made by the Hayes in different sections of this archive. Here we view her limitations in language.”

“Viki never developed spoken language abilities like human children do. Even as a baby, when most human children go through a babbling stage, Viki hardly made a sound. This is characteristic of chimpanzees and may, in fact, be quite adaptive. When you are trying to hide from lions and tigers, having an infant merrily babbling ‘La da ga’ may not be a good thing. In normal chimpanzees vocalizations are strongly tied to emotions. Chimps shriek when they are upset and make excited food barks they happen upon a bounty of food. However, the Hayes worked to build on what few vocalizations Viki made. She did manage some remarkable accomplishments in vocal control. Only later did researchers realize that differences in the anatomy of the vocal system between human and Chimpanzee made it all-but-impossible for chimps to produce the sounds of human language. That led to the introduction of sign language and other communication systems between human and Chimpanzee, but that is a tale for another day.”