In our recent book, """"""""The Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings,"""""""" (Rumbaugh & Washburn, 2003, Yale University Press, - Chapter XVI in particular), we offer a revised perspective of learning and behavior. Here we propose to pursue research implications of that perspective, in our previous NICHD-supported research, we have examined the language-competence that could be attained by apes when they are reared in environments rich with communicative information, opportunities, and technologies. We have come to believe that the salience of information (such as predictable relations about symbols and their meanings) is the key for learning, and that methods that make such relations salient will result in comprehension and production abilities that are not dependent of reinforcement history. Whereas we have demonstrated that social communication is one powerful way to make this linguistic information salient, we posit that it is the salience and not necessarily the social interaction that underlies language learning. Thus, the overarching goal of that project is to develop training software that will take even a relatively naive great ape from a point of basically observing pairs of associations between pairs of images on a monitor to the point where the ape has learned that one member of each pair of images has become a word lexigram and that the other image is an exemplar/referent for any given word-lexigram. If these efforts are successful, we will explore whether rhesus monkeys can learn referential symbols in a similar automated fashion. Just as our original language research resulted in powerful applications for augmentative communicative technologies, we believe that the present research will afford new intervention strategies for helping those with language and learning deficits.
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