Panzee was a chimp that was raised at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She today is known as the chimp who was able to recognize up to 130 english-language words and comprehend symbols. Through multiple tests, scientists were able to realize that Panzee was able to recognize a type of synthetic speech that reduces language into three whistle-like tones, this is called sine-wave form language, and this proved that Panzee was actually processing and perceiving the words spoken to her.
Lisa Heimbauer, Micheal Owren, and Micheal Beran conducted tests on Panzee’s ability to understand the words communicated to her by replicating the estimated frequency and amplitude patterns of natural utterances. During these tests, they were able to prove that Panzee still understood the words when they were stripped of their actually sounds. Panzee was able to match words on paper with their correlating photos. These tests introduced very important findings to something called the “speech is special” theory. This argument proposes the idea that besides humans being the only species able to produce speech, due to their anatomy, they also have a specialized cognitive module to process speech.
The alternative view to this hypothesis is that auditory processing is fundamentally similar across most mammals, and that many animals have latent abilities for speech perception. Scientists believe that Panzee is only able to understand speech so well due to the fact that she was raised in such a speech-rich environment and that because of that she was taught about the association between words and their meaning from a very early age. Nonetheless, these findings still suggest that with education and experience chimps are able to become proficient in some aspects of human languages, allowing them to communicate certain feelings and desires with us. Tecumseh Fitch, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, said these findings research, “provide important evidence that human speech perception abilities are built upon a pre-existing auditory basis, shared with other animals.” and while Panzee’s education puts her in a unique intellectual category, there has been other research done on birds, chinchillas and monkeys that suggests that these animals also can also categorize speech sounds.
