Looking for structure: Is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different?

• Main Author: Mark Patkowski
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of English Studies Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts Adam Mickiewicz University 2014-01-01
• Series: Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching
• Subjects: language development; animal language; cross-species comparison; semantic relations; word order
• Online Access: http://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt/article/view/3932

Previously published corpora of two-word utterances by three chimpanzees and three human children were compared to determine whether, as has been claimed, apes possess the same basic syntactic and semantic capacities as 2-year old children. Some similarities were observed in the type of semantic relations expressed by the two groups; however, marked contrasts were also uncovered. With respect to the major syntactic mechanism displayed in two-word child language, namely word order, statistically significant differences were found in all three comparisons that were tested. These results indicate that chimpanzees do not exhibit the linguistic capacities of 2-year old children.