Abstract
Attempts to teach language to nonhuman species have been unsuccessful; in 15 years of experimentation no nonhuman has acquired a language comparable to human language. This is not entirely a surprise, for even humans who are deficient in language cannot be taught normal human language. When children who do not acquire language in the first place and adults who acquire but then lose language through neurological damage are trained with the same procedures used with the apes, both apes and humans learn a similar system, one in which there is no evidence of grammatical classes, syntactic rules, recursion, structure-dependent rules—properties which set human language apart.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsFurther reading
Chomsky N (1975): Reflections on Language. New York: Random House
Pinker S (1979): Formal models of language learning. Cognition 7:217–283.
Premack D (1986): Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy. Cambridge: MIT Press
Wanner E, Gleitman LR, eds (1982): Language Acquisition: The State of the Art. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Premack, D. (1989). Language, Nonhuman. In: Speech and Language. Readings from the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience . Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6774-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6774-9_3
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-8176-3400-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-6774-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive