Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Yerkish, Psych, Behaviorism
10 Nov 2012
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Teach them in a fairly structured way the manual signs that correspond with words, see if they learn this, if they can form sentences. Sarah: an adult chimp that learned sign with extensive training. a lot of this work was done using the principles of behaviorism, operant training, produce signs in order to get a reward. Learned a fairly large vocabulary (human is about 1000 of signs, but nevertheless this is a lot of signs) Washoe: they wanted him to be able to string together signs into novel sentences. Created a compound word: water-bird; evidence of language creativity, however its hard to be able to determine the significance, could have been subjective. Koko: symbol for gorilla conversation, these animals are smart enough to use human language they must be important. Animals can be brilliant but there are different forms. Theres a lot of signing about things in the present space, no time travel (displacement) language.
