Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
The Nova documentary Ape Genius showed some pretty remarkable footage of a bonobo named Kanzi who appeared to show some remarkable linguistic ability, including following complex instructions in English without non-verbal cueing.
According to the documentary, Kanzi learned to understand English, to a limited extent, without formal training.
What Kanzi was doing in the film was more complex than, say, what a dog does when we say "Go get your ball".
Kanzi was able to discern subject and object, for instance, and understand purely verbal directional cues.
If this is legit -- and it seemed to be -- this is a tremendous breakthrough.
I've openly criticized much of the previous non-human language experiments with primates on this forum.
But this appears to be a whole nother ball of wax.
Still, I've been out of the field for some years now.
Can anyone here shed more light on the research, the researchers, etc.
For the first time, I'm thinking, wow, we may have a really important new insight here.
According to the documentary, Kanzi learned to understand English, to a limited extent, without formal training.
What Kanzi was doing in the film was more complex than, say, what a dog does when we say "Go get your ball".
Kanzi was able to discern subject and object, for instance, and understand purely verbal directional cues.
If this is legit -- and it seemed to be -- this is a tremendous breakthrough.
I've openly criticized much of the previous non-human language experiments with primates on this forum.
But this appears to be a whole nother ball of wax.
Still, I've been out of the field for some years now.
Can anyone here shed more light on the research, the researchers, etc.
For the first time, I'm thinking, wow, we may have a really important new insight here.
