Miles, H. L. (1983) Apes and language: The search for communicative competence. In Language in Primates: Perspectives and Implications, J. De Luce & H. T. Wilder (eds.). Springer-Verlag, New York. pp 43-61.

Author of the summary: Jim Davies, 1998, jim@jimdavies.org

Cite this paper for:

• agruments against cued motions attack on ape signing (p43)
• "Chantek" is Malaysian for "beautiful." (p47)
• Even When the care giver did nothing, Chantek made a sign every 27 seconds. (p56)
• Problems with the Nim Chimpsky project.

• Apes identify objecs in double blind tests
• Some apes attempt to sign when non-signing humans are around (that is, humans who don't know sign language and could not posisbly cue)
• The signs are too complex for this to happen.
• testing with absolutely no cues may be impossible, and even 2 year old children may fail on such a test if it were given.

p47. "Chantek" is Malaysian for "beautiful."

p 53 Chantek's long utterances have not been checked for grammar.

p56 Even When the care giver did nothing, Chantek made a sign every 27 seconds.

problems with the Nim Chimpsky project (which argues against ape language use):

• p58: Nim was often taught signs without the referent present (for fear that the referent would be distracting)
• p57: All language training was done in a concrete room that Nim appeared to be scared of.
• p56: Nim had 60 teachers, too many for a rapport.
• p57: Nobody on the project had previous experience handling apes
• p57: Nim was taught at first with a method used on retarded people, which actually extinguished signing behavior.

Summary author's notes:

• Facts repeated in other of Miles' papers' summaries are excluded from this outline.