Kanzy (Reading comprehension, CPE)

This is an example of Paper 1 (Reading), Part 4 of ESOL Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE), the most difficult among the exams designed by the University of Cambridge for students of English as a foreign/second language.

This part is designed to assess the candidates' reading skills: they have to read a long text and they need to understand the main idea and detail of the text and any opinions or attitudes which are expressed in it.
Time is limited in the exam, but not here!

____________________

Kanzy

Kanzy is a pygmy chimpanzee. When he was two and a half he was separated briefly from his mother (who had already begun her on language training) and he suddenly, without any coaxing at all, began to use her board and the symbols on it to request food and activities and announce what he was about to do. In one day he showed that he had learned signs his mother failed to learn. His trainers decided that from that point on Kanzi should be trained to use symbols, but that his training would reflect the casual, spontaneous learning he had already demonstrated. Kanzi has never been required to use symbols to get anything -- if he does use them it is because he has seen someone else using them, in much the same way (it's thought) a child learns to speak.

Kanzi is quite different from all other chimpanzees that have been taught to use symbols to express their thoughts. For one thing, he understands spoken English. Kanzi's trainers have even tested him with words produced by a speech synthesizer, one that produces a sound for every letter of the alphabet and comes out with very weird, flat, chipped, monotonous kind of speech, only two-thirds of which is understandable by adult humans. Kanzi understands about two-thirds of it as well, meaning that the emotional content, unintentional stresses on words and any of the other cues that might have tipped him to the meaning of the words spoken by his trainers cannot explain his understanding of speech.

There is also evidence that he can comprehend grammatically complicated commands, as long as they are precise. So if there is an orange sitting in front of Kanzi, and he is told,'Go to the sitting room and get the orange,' he hesitates (is he thinking 'which orange'?). But if the sentence is rearranged: 'Get the orange that is in the sitting room,' he has no trouble, even that there is that complicated (for a chimp) phrase in the middle, 'that's in the.' In fact at the age eight Kanzi was better at understanding such sentences than a two-year-old girl who was being asked the same sorts of questions. However, even a brilliant performance by Kanzi is going to be treated with caution by the skeptics, and there has already been some doubt cast on exactly what the symbols on the board mean to Kanzi. It has been argued that because Kanzi switches from one meaning to the other for a given symbol, depending on the context, the symbols cannot mean the same thing as a word means to a child. For instance, Kanzi will use 'juice' to refer to the 'drink', the place where he gets the drink, or the act of going to that place. But when tested for his vocabulary, he links the symbol 'juice' with the picture of a glass of juice. Critics use this evidence to claim Kanzi just uses the symbol as a means of solving different problems in different circumstances and has no idea it means 'juice' all the time.

This sounds like a tricky argument, because children do what appears to be the same sort of thing, like pointing to the chair and saying 'Daddy'. But the critics say that children rarely use a word for two different kind of things, like using 'table' to mean both the thing in the kitchen and breakfast, whereas Kanzi does.