Animali segnanti: sulla capacità di linguaggio in primati non umani

The present study reviews the first attempts to teach a sign language to nonhuman primates and discusses the controversial results provided by different cross-fostering laboratories starting with Project Washoe. After a long training, chimpanzees and gorilla memorized hundreds of signs and actively used them with comprehensible productions, combining them to create novel combinations. Nevertheless, nonhuman primates showed different patterns in language acquisition, compared to human children, as well as significant qualitative differences in sentence construction.