Lucy Kanzi Case Study Human Communication

Lucy was raised by humans, through “human” methods. Her adoptive human parents raised her as if she was their human daughter. After living with them, Lucy showed multiple signs of basic human abilities. One of them being, communication. Lucy was then taught sign language to communicate with her human parents and Janis. Lucy communicated with them and conversed with them. Even after her human parents was no longer capable of caring for her, Lucy remained “human.” She was taken to an island and was taken cared of by Janis. Even after showing that Lucy was able to communicate I am still not convinced that Lucy was exchanging conversations with these humans. One evidence of this comes from the island when Janis and Lucy would fight. Janis would
say “go” and Lucy would respond with “No, Janis come” and this would go on and on. From what we learned about classical conditioning Lucy was reacting to a conditioned stimulus. She responded with a phrase that she had most likely associated with that stimulus. Once I realized this, I listened again to the previous examples of her interacting with humans and it was just a bunch of conditioned stimulus followed by a conditioned response. She was displaying signs of communication but I am not convinced that she was exchanging words with the humans. She was merely performing an action (signing) after noticing a stimulant. Comparatively, Kanzi showed convincing signs of communication and interaction with humans.
Compared to Lucy, Kanzi was raised not to be human but to be able to communicate with humans and to create a bond between one another. Initially, I believed that Kanzi was reacting to conditioned stimulus because of the way he learned the words but after listening to the conversations he had with Bill, I was convinced that he was communicating with him and conversing with him in English. One major problem is, interpreting what Kanzi was saying. Primates are not capable of speaking like humans because they lack the same vocal cord movements that humans have. There were multiple examples of those the two having a conversation and almost all of them convinced me that they were, in fact, interacting and having a conversation. There was a moment when Kanzi spoke with Bill, telling him to bite the investigator because he/she was yelling at Sue regarding a problem about their format. Kanzi said that if Bill did not bite her, Kanzi would bite him. Bill being human refused to bite the investigator and Kanzi bit him. This is a great example that Kanzi was speaking English because Kanzi warned bill but he did not listen, which resulted in Bill getting multiple surgeries for his severed finger. For 8 months Bill and Kanzi did not communicate but after a long while, Kanzi apologized to Bill. His apology was genuine. He actually uttered the word sorry to
Bill.