How Yerkish Helped The Mentally Challenged: edit
Not only has the development of the Yerkish language improved communication between Chimps and humans, but the work with Lana has led to the betterment of humankind. Doctor Dorothy Parkel of the Georgia Retardation Center in Atlanta and psychologist Duane Rambaugh strove to apply this technology with human subjects, particularly mentally challenged kids. Dr. Parkel found that the same keyboard system that served Lana as a medium of communication can unlock the potential of mentally challenged children to express their wishes and feelings.[1]
Psychologist Mary Ann Romski stated that, "... retarded people know a lot of things and understand a lot of things that have not been tapped in the past, because they had no way to tell us". Doctors were hopeful that Yerkish could help close the communication gap for the mentally challenged. It was also believed that once the communication gap is reduced, mentally challenged kids would be in a better mood and would show much improved overall behavior.[1]
In 1981, Rumbaugh conducted an experiment that involved 14 mentally challenged humans with the consent of their family members. The experiment began with instructors teaching the participants symbols and their meanings, particularly ones regarding food. The subjects learned to communicate their favorite foods by identifying the symbol's shapes, rather than their position on the keyboard. Once the instructors believed that a subject has mastered the given symbol, they will then start teaching a new symbol. 8 out of the 14 subjects showed impressive progress, memorizing anywhere from 24 to 70 out of the 225 Yerkish symbols.[1]
One of the first cases worked on in Atlanta, Georgia was 23 year-old Sandra, who has been deaf, mute, and mentally challenged her entire life. Before this experiment liberated Sandra, she previously had been deemed helpless by doctors since birth. Sandra showed remarkable progress and learned to communicate her feelings. As predicted, this improved Sandra's overall emotional well being, and she was even allowed to move to a less restrictive section of the psychiatric ward as she wasn't showing as much behavior issues as before.[1]
Expanding on the Lana Project edit
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Throughout the experiment, Lana learned to improve the way she communicated her feelings. Instead of only pressing one or two lexigrams to communicate, she started piecing together multiple lexigrams to form a sentence such as "Please machine give banana". Once Lana became comfortable using single keys to express her requests, the next step was to require Lana to use the please key when requesting an item and also using the period key to finalize her sentences. The next step after that was to condense phrases into a single key. Rather than pressing 3 different keys to express "machine give banana", the phrase was condensed into one key. Once she became comfortable with using the condensed keys, the next goal for Lana was to condense entire sentences into a single key. This was done to measure Lana's comprehension of full sentences rather than single words. This change resulted in Lana carefully examining keys before pressing them.[2]
The director of the Lana project continued to press her in order to get the best results possible. The new focus of the project was to expose Lana to scenarios where she would have to do the same thing repeatedly, similar to experiments where a rat is asked to navigate a maze multiple times.. In one of the scenarios, Tim, a graduate student who worked with Lana throughout the experiments, continued to ask her the same question repeatedly. Lana typed in the response: "Please Tim move out of room". This was seen as by far the most remarkable sentence Lana formed throughout the project. It was impressive because Lana had not been exposed to terms such "out of" as much as she was exposed to other terms.[3]
Another impressive milestone in the Lana project was during an unplanned event. In this event, Lana was attempting to retrieve a banana from the dispenser when the banana dispenser was malfunctioning. Lana looked up at the instructor that was watching her at the time and ran to the keyboard to type "Please Shelley move behind room". From Lana's perspective, it seemed like Shelley would have to move behind the room to get to the dispenser. When Shelley didn't react to Lana's request, Lana had a very human-like reaction when she threw her hands up in the air in confusion and frustration. Shelley then proceeded to clear the malfunctioning dispenser. Lana once again typed: "Please machine give piece of banana".[3]
The reason those two scenarios were specially remarkable is that they showed how Lana was capable of reacting and communicating to unplanned spontaneous occurrences, such as the banana getting stuck or her communicating to Tim that she wanted out of the room.
Project Statistics edit
The statistics for Lana's project is as follows: Lana's original lexigram consisted of 3 panels of 25 keys each. In a month's span, Lana produced a remarkable total of 1577 grammatical 6-lexigram strings, adding up to 125 different sentence types. 4 types were food requests, and account for 1288 tokens. Of the remaining 289 tokens, 228 represent 76 types that were spontaneously formulated by Lana - none of them which were produced as a result of training.[3]
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- ^ a b c d Keerdoja, Eileen (July 8, 1985). "Scaling the Walls of Silence". Newsweek. 106: 66.
- ^ Rumbaugh, Duane (April 1974). "Lana (chimpanzee) learning language: A progress report" (PDF). Brain and Language. 1: 2.
- ^ a b c Bettoni, Marco (March 2007). "The Yerkish Language - From Operational Methodology to Chimpanzee Communication". Constructivist Foundations. 2: 107–121.