Viki’s First Words

It remains an open question whether nonhuman great apes are capable of vocal learning-modification of uttered signals from experience with other individuals.Evidence of such capacities would provide insight into when human imitative abilities-crucial for spoken language-first emerged.However, an important case study with bearing on this topic has been neglected in the literature-that of Viki the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).Only a few days old, Viki was adopted by Keith and Catherine Hayes of the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology and raised in a human home.Whilst in the Hayeses' care, Viki became an early case in a series of attempts by scientists to teach human language to nonhuman great apes.Ultimately, Viki learned to consistently produce four words: "mama," "papa," "cup," and "up" (Hayes & Hayes, 1951) and was claimed to babble like a human child.This would suggest that chimpanzees are capable of vocal learning.It is surprising, then, that no phonetic analysis of recordings of Viki's speechlike behavior has ever been presented.Providing such an analysis is the purpose of this brief report and case study.For the study, I curated audio from a segment of the Television movie The Alphabet Conspiracy (Warner Bros., 1959).To my knowledge, this film contains the only widely available recording of Viki's speechlike utterances.Across the recording, I identified three pulses of supposed "babble," three utterances of "papa," and a single utterance of "cup," which were all analyzed by way of spectrograms.I was unable to identify the "up" and "mama" utterances purported by the Hayeses (Hayes & Hayes, 1951).Because of genetic relatedness between chimpanzees and modern humans, I assumed that human approximation of speech-like sounds uttered by a chimpanzee should recruit much of the same articulatory organs and mechanisms.Thus, to compare Viki's speechlike utterances with human phonemes, I, a male speaker aged 26, made recordings imitating Viki's speechlike production.This was done to elucidate potential

Animal ecology · Biology · Linguistics · Phonetics · Zoology · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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