Who apes English?

Jack K. Horner

pp. 347-357

in: John Deely, Margot D. Lenhart (eds), Semiotics 1981, Berlin, Springer, 1983

Abstract

Recently, the conjecture that man is the only primate capable of using a language containing sentential structures apparently has received strong evidential support.¹ In general, the evidence suggests that there are significant differences between the respective utterance corpora of humans and chimpanzees who have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), differences which involve the incidence of repetition in adjacent utterances and the mean length of utterances.²