ed Terrace to believe that prompting by trainers with a reward may be a reason for a chimp's language usage. Terrace argued that while chimps may have the potential to create grammatical sentences, no one has proven it.Another question is whether chimps really understand that words are symbols for something else. Their signs may be just operant behaviors used to get a desired treat; a chimp may learn the sign for banana to get a banana as a reward. The chimp may just see the signs not as a symbol, but as a behavior that results in a reward. If this is the case, then chimps are using words in a very different way than children do. Chimps rarely ask the names of new objects or actions, as curious children do. And they do not often call attention to things they are doing or seeing.Researcher Savage-Rumbaugh attempted to teach "naming" to two chimps, Sherman and Austin. They were taught to use symbols on a keyboard to represent words for objects, actions, and qualities. In one test, the researchers put several different kinds of food on a table out of sight of the chimps' keyboard. Each chimp was allowed to go over to the table and choose which food he wanted to eat and then go back to the keyboard and state his choice. Then the researchers had the next chimp retrieve the desired food. If the chimp came back with the right food item, he could eat it. If the chimp brought the wrong food, the researcher showed disappointment and pointed to the symbol the chimp had used. Both Austin and Sherman learned to do this and similar "naming" tasks with few mistakes. Their trainers thought that the chimps really did understand that the keyboard symbols stood for certain things.Some researchers do not believe that Sherman's and Austin's behaviors prove that they have an understanding of words as symbols and they do not think that the chimps use the same cognitive processes as humans do.. The two chimp's trainers say that they never meant ...
