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Because of their big brains, genial smiles and noble foreheads, dolphins have long attracted human champions quite willing to credit the marine mammals with all sorts of higher mental abilities. To a hard-nosed scientist, however, the noble forehead is a housing for sonar gear, the upturned smile is an adaptation that makes it easier for the animal to scoop up fish, and it is open to question for what purposes the animal uses its large brain. Herman and others working with animals have been criticized for using linguistic terms like word or syntax when some cruder system may describe what is occurring in a dolphin's head.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to know precisely what goes on in another creature's mind and to what degree it understands the languages it uses. Take the case of the gorilla Koko, first taught 20 years ago to use American Sign Language by psychologist Penny Patterson. On one much discussed occasion, the powerful gorilla had inadvertently knocked a sink off its moorings in her living quarters. Koko signed the words "Kate there bad," pointing to the sink. Was the muscular animal trying, rather implausibly, to shift the blame to one of Patterson's slightly built female assistants? Or was she merely making signs vaguely associated with the event? Sixteen years later, there is still no definitive answer.
For his part, Herman admits that his dolphins are a long way from humans in their use of language. But he vehemently insists that they do have a conceptual grasp of the words they learn. "If you accept that semantics and syntax are core attributes of human language," says Herman, "then we have shown that the dolphins also account for these two features within the limits of this language."
Some scientists, particularly those from the behaviorist school of psychology, take a more skeptical view. What looks like language, they say, may be simply mimicry or rote learning. One of Herman's critics, animal behaviorist Ronald Schusterman, insists that before anyone can say an animal is speaking, they had better determine whether the beast is capable of the kind of abstract thinking that forms the basis of speech. "My argument is that the language experiments have moved too fast," says Schusterman. "They have not looked at some fundamental cognitive abilities that give rise to linguistic abilities." At Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, Schusterman has been trying to fill that gap.
Games of Logic with Sea Lions
Unlike the sunny-dispositioned dolphins, sea lions radiate intensity. Schusterman chose them for his research because they are easily trained. He did not attempt to teach seven-year-old Rio a language. Instead, he wanted to determine if the female sea lion could understand logical relationships between symbols presented on poster boards. For instance, by rewarding the sea lion selectively, trainers taught Rio that a symbol looking like a mug was equivalent to one that looked like a watch. Then she was taught that the watch symbol was equivalent to a third symbol that looked like a bomb. The question was whether she could make the jump to understanding that the mug was therefore equivalent to a bomb.