ABSTRACT
For quite some time, a number of scholars in such disciplines as psychology, anthropology, and linguistics have sought to prove that nonhuman primates are indeed capable of language. They also believe that a precursor of human communication systems in some definable form may be found among species other than Homo sapiens. The contributions, greatly enhanced beyond the symposium papers in scope and research orientation, represent the works of anthropologists, psychologists linguists, and manual language experts. Specifically, then, sign language is seen, not as a self-contained entity, but rather as a general norm of individual sign activities that are undergoing rapid development and changes in any given society. Miles' article is a survey of the current projects on nonhuman primate language acquisition, along with a succinct comparison between human and nonhuman learning of sign language, from various standpoints, based on reports and results from a number of investigations, including her own.
