- St Andrew's University has acquired its very own Dr Dolittle,
with the arrival of a Harvard academic on a mission to teach seals to talk.
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- Tecumseh Fitch, a specialist in language evolution, plans
to recruit undergraduates to "hang out" with young seals in the
hope that the seals will pick up human speech patterns.
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- The experiment may have echoes of Hugh Lofting's creation,
but it is inspired by the bizarre but entirely genuine example of a talking
seal called Hoover, who entertained visitors at an aquarium in Boston,
Massachusetts, with entire phrases delivered in gravelly male tones.
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- "He said things like 'hey Hoover, get out of there',
and 'move over Hoover'," said Dr Fitch. "Not only did he do this,
he said it with a Maine fisherman's accent."
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- On this side of the Atlantic, Dr Fitch and his colleague
Vincent Janik will research seals' rare ability - shared with humans and
birds - to imitate sounds.
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- Working in the university's Gatty marine laboratory,
they will try to establish why the creatures are able to replicate sounds
- Dr Janik has already taught one Scottish seal to repeat "growls
and whines" on command, though unfortunately it has had to be released
back into the sea - and to understand how they are physically able to do
so.
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- Providing the work with the animals is approved, there
should be no trouble in finding students to chat to the seals, Dr Fitch
believes. "They will just hang out with them, talking to them every
day in a deep male voice."
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- The aim of the test will be to reproduce the conditions
which led to speech in Hoover, an orphan seal adopted as a pup by a Maine
fisherman, George Swallow, and his wife. At around six months, when he
became "too unruly" to live with the Swallows, Hoover moved to
an aquarium, where he began to speak in the tones of his adoptive "father"
some three years later.
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- Dr Fitch never met Hoover, now sadly dead, but has heard
recordings. "It is quite hard to hear them and not laugh. When I first
played them for an audience of scientists, some of them asked me if it
was a joke."
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- The serious aim of the work, he stresses, is to follow
a new path in the study of the evolution of language. Instead of trying
to teach chimps to make language, which has yielded limited results, research
is focusing on animals which already have such ability, including seals.
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- EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1077281,00.
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