A propósito de lo que publiqué ayer sobre los bonobos y el lenguaje, he copipegado lo que dice la Wikipedia sobre Kanzi, el bonobo que trabajó con la psicóloga y primatóloga Sue Savage-Rumbaugh y que llegó a aprender miles de símbolos para comunicarse y entender mensajes completos. No es el único simio que lo ha conseguido, pero sí uno de los que mejor nos ha permitido entender los misterios del lenguaje y la cognición humanas.
Kanzi learned to communicate using a keyboard with lexigrams. Kanzi also picked up signs from American Sign Language from watching videos of Koko the gorilla, who communicated using signs to her keeper Penny Patterson; Savage-Rumbaugh did not realize Kanzi could sign until he signed, “You, Gorilla, Question”, to anthropologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, who had previously worked closely with gorillas. Based on trials performed at Yerkes Primate Research Center, Kanzi was able to identify symbols correctly 89–95% of the time.
Kanzi could not vocalize in a manner that is comprehensible to most humans, as bonobos’ vocal tracts are different from the vocal tracts of humans, making them incapable of reproducing most of the vocal sounds humans can make. Nonetheless, it was noticed that every time Kanzi communicated with humans with specially designed graphic symbols, he also produced some vocalization.
Later, it was discovered that Kanzi was producing the articulatory equivalent of the symbols he was indicating, although in a very high pitch and with distortions.
According to the research of Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi “can understand individual spoken words and how they are used in novel sentences”. For example, the researcher asked Kanzi to go get the carrot in the microwave, Kanzi went directly to the microwave and completely ignored the carrot that was closer to him, but not in the microwave. In another example, a researcher gave the task, “feed your ball some tomato”. Alia, a human 2-year-old, did not know what to do, but Kanzi immediately used a spongy toy Halloween pumpkin as a ball and began to feed the toy.
De la Wikipedia.