4 - The Sarah project

Summary

In Intelligence in Ape and Man, Premack (1976a) characterizes his studies as focused on intelligence rather than language per se, language being of interest only insofar as it illuminates the former. He also maintains that the language imparted to Sarah was not intended to simulate a human one. Despite these disclaimers, it is clearly language and its cognitive bases that are the topic of Premack's writings about Sarah. Furthermore, Premack implicitly and often avowedly regards Sarah's accomplishments as cognitively identical to aspects of human language. In reality, though her intellectual achievements may have exceeded those of Lana, Sarah's are probably no more languagelike than Lana's.

THE SEMANTICITY OF SARAH'S CHIPS

The major critique of Premack's work with Sarah was made by Terrace (1979a), and the following discussion relies extensively on that work. It is interesting that this most effective critique came not from a linguist anxious to beat back an interloper into the domain of human language but from a fellow behavioral psychologist, whose expertise in experiments on problem-solving by lower animals resulted in a critique “from below” rather than “from above,” that is, an argument that Sarah's performance is not different in nature from that demonstrable in rats and pigeons. In a nutshell, the Premack study, like the work with Lana and, less obviously, the signing projects, suffered from rampant overinterpretation.

As an example, consider a typical “sentence” that Sarah learned to compose in order to procure an incentive: “Mary give Sarah apple.” If one were told that Sarah reliably constructed this sequence in the presence of an apple, substituting the chip for banana if this were the incentive, one might well be impressed.