The prohects which psychologists have attempted to teach primates communication systems have raised an intriguing possibility: even if a primate species (such as the chimpanzee) has a very rudimentary natural communication system in the wild, perhaps a member of this psecies could be taught a communication system not natural to the species. Are primates in fact able to acquire and use language in a way similar to the way humans do? Could primates create the sentences? I will show several experiments about primates and examine the differencies of learning language between human beings and primates.
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How would one identify something as a language if he encountered what might be one in an obviously nonhuman species? And for that matter, is the natural signing of deaf-mutes a language? What about the `language` of music of art?
`Language` is considered as the only capacity which distinguishes human beings from animals. According to Chomsky, it is important not only for ¡¦(»ý·«)
linguists but also psychologists whose research centers on these issues to know that even in a rudimentary phase of learning language, babies are much better than primates. A lot of psycholinguistes have attempted to challenge his idea so they tried to teach primates communication systems of human beings.
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