It was David Hume who remarked that "infants, nay even brute beasts-improve by experience." The inference here is that they do not reason their way to an understanding of, say, causality, but rather through a natural process of association. So what, then, are we to say of the suggestion here that apes can learn grammar. I doubt that it is by some innate grasp of the concept of infinity, nor some mechanism for decoding and following rules. No, it is going to be again the same sort of associative process described today by neural networks and connectionism.
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