Introduction: MonkeysWhen humans think of talking animals, we usually think of it as quite ironic. We don't think this is normal because they are animals and conversing is not something they do. But in reality, all animals talk to each other in ways that human society will never understand. It may not be a real language, with words, but it is something they use to communicate with each other. Our class has had the privilege of taking a closer look at how animals communicate, but when we talk about animals, we mean a specific animal. • How spontaneously did the monkeys use language? • How creatively did the apes use language? • Can monkeys create sentences? the implications of studies on monkey language? Monkeys communicate with their own “languages”; In the next few paragraphs we are going to talk about monkeys and how they converse with each other and with humans. To what extent did the monkeys spontaneously use language? Primates, like monkeys, communicate by listening and responding through what they have been taught. If you teach a monkey to ring a bell when it is hungry, that is how it will communicate and tell you that it is hungry. Monkeys are not able to physically speak, so they use their words through their actions. In a way, you can relate them to babies. Babies cannot speak from birth, so they communicate with their hands and eyes to ask for things and communicate with adults. In an important paper, Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, and Bever reported that monkeys imitated and were taught by their handlers' commands, rather than speaking naturally. Monkeys are trained to communicate with humans so that they can relate to them. Terrace and his colleagues at Columbia University paid a lot of attention to a chimpanzee they trained, named Nim,...... middle of paper ... made discoveries that could attract the attention even from skeptics. Ongoing studies at the Yerkes Primate Research Center have revealed astonishing similarities between the brains of chimpanzees and humans. Using brain scans of living chimpanzees, researchers found that, as in humans, “the PT [planum temporale] that controls language is larger on the left side of the chimpanzee brain than on the right side. But it is not lateralized in apes, which are less closely related to humans than apes. (Begley, 1998) Although studies of ape language continue to generate disagreement, researchers have shown over the past thirty years that the gap in abilities The question of the relationship between apes and humans is much less dramatic than we once believed. With more research, we may be able to find more similarities between apes and humans..