jooyous comments on Humans in Funny Suits - Less Wrong
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee) "Washoe was raised in an environment as close as possible to that of a human child, in an attempt to satisfy her psychological need for companionship."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky "Nim at 2 weeks old was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents"
The consensus on the results seems to be that they learned hundreds of words of ASL, but do not seem to be able to learn to combine them with any sort of grammar other than grouping situationally-related words close together in time. More a series of single-gesture associations and exclamations than sentences. Our language and communication faculties don't have much of a counterpart in there.
As they matured they also appeared to become aggressive and uncontrollable. Though perhaps that has something to do with being fully physically mature by age 11 after entering puberty at age 7...
Thanks for hunting down the links! The Nim story sounds really sad. =/
I kinda feel like that experiment was trying too hard to teach Nim to think like a human, rather than find out what/how Nim thinks. I'd be pretty impressed with combinations of words without grammar from other animals, considering that's less than we currently have.