creators_name: Cowley, Stephen
creators_name: Spurrett, David
creators_id: 
creators_id: 466
type: journalp
datestamp: 2004-01-13
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:27
metadata_visibility: show
title: ‘Putting apes (body and language) together again’, a review article of Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Taylor, T. J., and Shanker, S. G. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (Oxford: 1999) and Clark, A. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (MIT: 1997)
ispublished: pub
subjects: bio-ani-cog
subjects: bio-primat
subjects: cog-psy
full_text_status: public
keywords: Ape language; Distributed cognition; Language development
abstract: It is argued that the account of Savage-Rumbaugh’s ape language research in Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker and Taylor (1998. Apes, Language and the Human Mind. Oxford University
Press, Oxford) is profitably read in the terms of the theoretical perspective developed in Clark (1997. Being There, Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). The former work details some striking results concerning chimpanzee and bonobo subjects, trained to make use of keyboards containing ‘lexigram’ symbols. The authors, though, make heavy going of a critique of what they take to be standard approaches
to understanding language and cognition in animals, and fail to offer a worthwhile theoretical position from which to make sense of their own data. It is suggested that the achievements of Savage-Rumbaugh’s non-human subjects suggest that language ability need not be explained
by reference to specialised brain capacities. The contribution made by Clark’s work is to show the range of ways in which cognition exploits bodily and environmental resources. This model of ‘distributed’ cognition helps makes sense of the lexigram activity of Savage-Rumbaugh’s
subjects, and points to a re-evaluation of the language behaviour of humans.

date: 2003
date_type: published
publication: Language Sciences
volume: 25
number: 3
publisher: Elsevier
pagerange: 289-318
refereed: FALSE
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citation:   Cowley, Stephen and Spurrett, David  (2003) ‘Putting apes (body and language) together again’, a review article of Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Taylor, T. J., and Shanker, S. G. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (Oxford: 1999) and Clark, A. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (MIT: 1997).  [Journal (Paginated)]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/3378/1/Apes_archive.pdf