Language, Name, and Concept

The experiment of teaching a young chimpanzee to use American sign language1 is an important advance on previous attempts to test the linguistic potential of primates. For the first time, a primate’s capacity for a language used by some humans has been clearly separated from his capacity for making the sounds of human speech. In the nature of things, this pioneer study has been made under special conditions, and (like any single study) cannot be assumed to be perfectly representative. Nevertheless, it does offer evidence of a new kind, in the light of which it is timely to reexamine the relation between human language and the signals that animals use or can learn to use.