Can an ape have a conversation?

James D. Benson
William S. Greaves
York University

Rationale for a study of a corpus of conversations between language enculturated bonobos and humans.

We argue that apes can adhere to conversational norms, i.e. take turns appropriately, and carry out a sustained negotiation in ways that humans recognize as such. Our conclusion is based on regularities in three brief conversations between Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh et al 1993) and three different human interlocutors. Our method of inquiry is oriented to the language as action tradition rather than the language as product tradition (Bargh 2006:150); that is, we are concerned with ‘the functions and purposes of language, how people use it to get things done in their daily lives’. Bargh (2006:147) notes ‘amazing advances in our knowledge of the kinds of psychological concepts and processes that can be primed or put into motion nonconsciously’, among them ‘social norms to guide or channel behavior within the situation’. In our view, casual conversation construes just such social norms.

Our analytical framework of casual conversation fleshes out the proposals of Pickering and Garrod (2004) about automatic processing with a discourse model is grounded in the language as action tradition (Halliday 1975, Benson and Greaves 2005). The model was originally developed to account for the normative structures of casual conversation (Eggins and Slade 2005). The model is a layered hierarchy of increasingly differentiated choices of moves in discourse. The choices are a system of constraints on what can be said in response to a previous speaker, but these constraints allow for great flexibility, e.g. a speaker has the choice of responding supportively or confrontationally. The system is shared between interactants, since they alternate as speaker and addressee. The key point is that the turns in dialogue are coupled.

The three brief conversations with language-enculturated bonobos are sustained and highly coordinated, and demonstrate that the bonobos have the capacity to keep the perspective of their human interlocutors in mind. With the interactive alignment model (Garrod and Pickering 2004), these conversations, in which bonobo and human interlocutors negotiate mutual understanding, can be explained without recourse to prompting or mindreading, by identifying the processes of alignment and repair, which occur in canonical moves in dialogue. The findings make it possible to make predictions about a larger scale study of bonobo-human discourse.



References

Bargh, John A. 2006. ‘What have we been priming all these years?’ European Journal of Social Psychology, 36:147-168.

Benson, James, and William Greaves.  2005.  Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse. London: Equinox.

Eggins, Suzanne, and Diana Slade. 2005. Analyzing Casual Conversation. London: Equinox.

Garrod, Simon and Marin J. Pickering. 2004. ‘Why is conversation so easy?’ Trends in Cognitive Science, 8,1:8-11.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1995.  'On Language in Relation to the Evolution of Human Consciousness'.   In Allen, Sture, ed. Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 92. Of Thoughts and Words: the relation between language and mind.  Singapore:
Imperial College Press, pp. 45-84.

Pickering, Martin J. and Simon Garrod. 2004. ‘Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 27:169-226.

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, Murphy, J, Sevcik, R., Brakke, K., Williams, S. and D. Rumbaugh. 1993. Language Comprehension in Ape and Child. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.