Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Chapter 3 Tomasello, chimps & babies

pg. 60 "for the most part, nonhuman primate mothers and infants do not engage in the kinds of intense face-to-face engagement characteristics of Western middle-class mothers and infants, but they do stay in constant physical contact and so their interactions may, like the interactions of some non-Western mothers and infants, reflect protoconversations of a different sort. There is only one study of a single, human-raised, chimpanzee infant mimicking tongue protrusion in much the same way as human infants (Myowa, 1996), but there are no studies of chimpanzee mimicking of other kinds of actions or the making of adjustments to reproduce novel movements."
[protoconversations: interaction patterns between mothers and babies where the mothers speak when their babies stop babbling or when the mothers finish the babies' 'conversations']

So my question here is, is this because the chimpanzee was raised by humans? How does that complicate the study? I would think that the study would need to have been done on a chimp to chimp protoconversation because that would be the natual experience that Tomasello is trying to compare the the human experience... any thoughts?

Question #2: I'm not sure if this is related or not, but I'm wondering if there is any gender differences in this 9-month thing, since Tomasello points out that it isn't just 9 month bday and the baby changes, but that it is a span. I've heard before that boys and girls are virtually the same as babies and toddlers, however, I have also heard that speech, mobility and toilet training all occur earlier with baby girls... any correlation here?

Also, as Tomasello continues to describe these children and their 9-month revelation, along with the different studies of imitative, emulative, etc. learning, I can only think that the largest difference bewtween humans and primates is the addition of language. Although I'm guessing chimpanzees have some sort of noise language (i don't know much about animal communication) I am pretty sure that their language is not quite as involved as ours and therefore their children do not have both language to listen to and actions to observe.

***complete sidenote: This book is interesting, but he's driving me crazy when he refers to his studies in the 3rd person!

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