Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2012 A multimodal analysis of the communicative utterances of a language competent bonobo (Pan paniscus) Daniel Musgrave Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Animal Sciences Commons, Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Musgrave, Daniel, "A multimodal analysis of the communicative utterances of a language competent bonobo (Pan paniscus)" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 12415. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/12415 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A multimodal analysis of the communicative utterances of a language competent bonobo (Pan paniscus) by Daniel Jay Musgrave A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: Anthropology Program of Study Committee: Jill Pruetz, Major Professor Grant Arndt Mack Shelley Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2012 Copyright © Daniel Jay Musgrave, 2012. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Abstract vii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review 10 Chapter 3: Methods 53 Chapter 4: Results 64 Chapter 5: Discussion 68 Chapter 6: Conclusions 99 Bibliography 103 Appendix 1: Coding Data 120 Appendix 2: Statistical Output 129 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would not have been possible without the generous support and assistance that I received throughout the past half decade. First and foremost, I wish to thank Iowa State University for their support and instruction throughout my academic career. Special thanks goes to the Anthropology program at large, headed by the indestructible and only slightly loquacious Paul Lasley, for their patience, unwavering support, and informative conservation. I am also grateful for their financial support in the form of the Nancy R. Coinman award for anthropological research, which significantly assisted with the costs of this research, and their assistance in securing a Professional Advancement Grant for my trip to the Michigan University “Is Boas Dead 2011” Conference. Additionally, I could not have completed this project without the help of the staff and administration of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. I owe thanks to Ted Townsend, Al Setka, Jim Aipperspach, Duane Rumbaugh, Beth Dalbey, Mike German, and all the other Trust employees including the security guards who I knew only by their first names (including Security Steve and Chuck). My fellow bonobo care-takers, Itai Roffman, Susanna Maisel, Heather Taylor, Robin Cleland, Andrea Jackson, Liz Pugh, Takashi Yoshida, and Tyler Romine were instrumental in facilitating my research and making every day meaningful. Tyler Romine deserves special recognition for being a totally solid lab supervisor. Special thanks are due to my more academic associations from the Trust including Janni Pedersen, for her constant enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge, Thomas Perrson, for his correspondence and for being my own Clever Hans-like cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of ape research, and T.J. Kasperbauer, for being a sounding board for any and all iv ideas, frustrations, and other ephemera. Lastly, this project would not have been more than a seed of an idea had it not been for the efforts and training I gained under the supervision of Bill Fields and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Bill Fields’ direction was key to my development and maturation as a thinker, anthropologist, and human. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh deserves extra acknowledgement for allowing me to access the video archives required to perform this research. I am eternally indebted to the members of my thesis committee, Mac Shelley, Grant Arndt, and Jill Pruetz, who each went above and beyond to ensure that I was always in a position to succeed. Mac Shelley, thank you for your input and guidance into the statistical aspects of my project. I would probably still be scribbling frantically and doing math on an abacus without your knowledge and golden computer analysis skills. Also, thank you for using plain English when explaining statistics to me and for not convincing me to do more tests than were within my experimental scope. Grant Arndt, thank you for getting me to appreciate Marshall Sahlins and convincing me to buy that giant tome of his writings. It was worth every penny. Furthermore, thank you for all the overtime hours you have put in going over my paper drafts for conferences and orienting me towards the more productive theoretical aspects of my interests. And speaking of interest, thank you for yours. Your openness to my thoughts on ape language was an extraordinary comfort and welcome relief from the constant criticism that seems to shadow the subject. I would not have had near the level of confidence in my scholarship had it not been for that. v Jill Pruetz, thank you for putting up with my antics, or at least the consequences of them, and for always having my back. Your unwavering support, whether from abroad or right on campus, was always a source of great comfort and security in an otherwise tumultuous couple years for me outside of the classroom. I could not have chosen a better environment or advisor with which to pursue my masters. Perhaps most importantly, I must thank all the families that, when put together, comprise my one family. To my Mom, who may at one time have said I might not be made for scientific work, thank you for your continued emotional and financial support. To my Dad, thank you for your emotional support and continued amazement at both my studies and this specific research. To Rye, Claire, and Sophie, thank you for making me grow up and for teaching me how to take responsibility. To the Perkins family, thank you for making Iowa actually feel like my home. Thank you for the dinners, the holidays, and your constant questions which helped me develop and refine my ideas about apes and how to communicate about them. And thank you for raising such a wonderful daughter, who has kept me sane while researching and writing. Lastly, I have to thank, with all my heart, Kanzi and his family of bonobos because without them none of this would have been possible. My time with them has taught me more about what it means to be human, and how to be a good person, than any amount of formal education could even dream of imparting on me. They have given me a home, friendship, and a purpose for over six years. It was with great anxiety that I took on this project, knowing that any lapses, problems, or misjudgments would have more consequences for vi them than for me going forward. It was this thought that helped to propel me through this project. To Kanzi, even though you threw hot oatmeal all over me that one time; Panbanisha, with your shyness and depths of caring in your eyes; Nyota, for your skills with the ladies and the way that, if no one was looking, you could be so sweet to me; Elikya, for how much more you understand than you are ever given credit for; Maisha, with your simple overriding desire to be loved and nothing more; Teco, for your nap times and sleepy hugs; Matata, with your constant plotting, planning, and conniving and for taking me under your wing and trying to teach me how to behave the right way; P-suke, for your real smile, not the one you were taught to perform, and for your children; and lastly Nathan, for everything, but especially for teaching me how to tickle. Thank you. vii ABSTRACT Language is a multimodal experience that flows through vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions and even textual or symbolic mediums. New studies on captive apes shows that they employ multimodal communication more often than not, yet this methodology has not been applied to apes reared in language-rich environments, either with American Sign Language or printed symbols. Using archived video data of spontaneous communicative interactions (n= 336) between a language enculturated bonobo (Pan paniscus), Kanzi, and human caretakers, I catalogue utterances and analyze them for lexigram (printed symbols) and manual gesture combinations. Gestures are catalogued within Kendon’s continuum (2004) in the categories of beats, points, and iconics. Kanzi was shown to produce a significantly larger mean utterance length (1.46 symbols per utterance) than the 1.15 posited by Clive Wynne (2001). Kanzi also produced significantly longer mean utterances when gestures were included in the analysis (1.85 symbols per utterance). Kanzi did not significantly alter his production in conditions of prompted versus spontaneous utterances, which suggests no Clever Hans or performance aspect to his productions. However, Kanzi was shown to increase his utterance length depending on his number of repetitions, suggesting he employs the Gricean Maxim of Quantity (1975) in his communications. Further discussion focuses on how Kanzi’s abilities are often misrepresented through some individual’s adherence to the longstanding metaphysical divide between humans and animals. 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Language is a multimodal experience that flows through vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions and even textual or symbolic mediums. How much of this multi-modal facility is uniquely human has long been questioned. Work by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues with a family of language enculturated bonobos (Pan paniscus) has attempted to probe the limits of human uniqueness with regards to language competence for the past 30 years (Savage-Rumbaugh et al.