The Case of Kanzi: Animal Language Acquistion?

The worry is that such demonstrations merely show what psychologists call a CR or "conditioned response." That is the animal, the skeptic asserts, has just learned to link a certain picture with an object. In order to demonstrate language acquisition one would need to show that the animal displays more than the understanding of the meaning of individual words (semantics = word meaning) but can string them in appropriate ways (syntax = sentence structure).

Consider the following:



Just for kicks here is Kanzi playing Pac-Man.