Can humans learn chimpspeak?

“Very few researchers have asked whether humans can learn to communicate like another animal,” says Dr Laurie Santos, director of the Primate Cognition Lab at Yale University.

“Most of the research on animal communication consists of mostly failed attempts to see if animals can use human language. Researchers spent decades and lost many fingers trying to teach chimpanzees to speak, manually moulding their mouths into the right positions. So this is a neat twist on an old question.”

Here is the full story. I’ll predict that humans are not very good at communicating with animals in this manner, for many of the same reasons that animals cannot speak English very well.

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