ABSTRACT
Our attempts to teach counting to the chimpanzees have enjoyed notably little success—so little that even the elementary stages of counting now loom as a far greater challenge than the elementary stages of language. Of course, this view is not incompatible with the development of the child—it displays a considerable grasp of language before showing any numerical skills. However, the view is contradicted by at least one reported success of teaching chimpanzees to count (Ferster, 1964). Unfortunately, this study is marred by the absence of a test requiring the animals to respond to magnitudes different from those used in training, and the number of magnitudes used in training were “small,” easily within the chimpanzee's memorization capacity. Although it does not do simply to darken this reported success by placing it in the shadow of our failure, I cannot but remain skeptical until shown the results of a transfer test. 1
