【正文】 annot be treated as cases where animals can use language. Therefore, psychologists and linguists turned their attention to apes and chimpanzees who are considered to be the closest relatives of humans. (Aitchson, 2000: 23)In the first several famous attempts to teach language to chimps, the chimps were brought up as human children and were supposed to utter words and sentences. Even though a chimp named Viki did manage to utter four simple words PAPA, MAMA, CUP and UP (Hayes, 1951), none of the chimps in these experiments, strictly speaking, finally could talk in human language. Later technological findings proved that chimps are not physiologically capable of uttering human sounds which justified the failure of the initial attempts. Therefore, later experiments tried to teach sign language to chimps and apes or teach them to press symbols on keyboards instead of directly teaching them to talk.In the experiment conducted by R. Allen Gardner in 1966, a female chimp named Washoe was taught to use modified American Sign Language (ASL) in which signs stand for words. The chimp was kept continuously surrounded by humans who municated with her and each other by signs. Before she grew too large to continue the experiment, Washoe acquired more than one hundred single words, for example, COME, HURRY, SWEET, etc. Her speech showed some design features possessed by human language. First, her speech had semanticity for she had no difficulty in understanding that a sign means a certain object or action. For example, she spontaneously made the sign for flower when she was shown a picture of flowers. Second, she could generalize from one situation to another. For instance, at the beginning, she could merely use the sign for more in the situation to be tickled by researchers。 but she finally could correctly use the sign in many other situations, say, to mean more food. Third, Washoe showed some creativity in her spontaneous use of binations of signs. For example, she produced two or threeword sequences of her own invention like OPEN FOOD DRINK (which means “to open the fridge”). (Gardner, 1969)Other experiments obtained similar results as R. Allen Gardner’s experiment of Washoe, with the chimps in some experiments learning more words or seeming more productive. However, all the chimps in these experiments used symbols primarily to obtain items they wanted, mainly food, and the notion of talking for the sake of talking is largely a human attribute. Despite the fact that some design features like arbitrariness, displacement and creativity were observed in the experiments, none of the chimps could cope with the more plicated properties of language like duality. Therefore, it is proper to infer that humans are innately programmed to acquire language. Children Language AcquisitionBiologists, psychologists and linguists in different countries have observed and recorded the process of acquisition of different languages in last century in the exploration into the nature of human language. Several facts that seem universal for all children acquiring different languages are interesting and inspiring and may support the idea that language is, to some extent, innate.The first interesting phenomenon found in several separate studies is that language emerges at about the same time in children all over the world. The question naturally arises that why do children normally begin to speak at almost the same time. According to studies, the answer is not likely to be that all mothers in different countries and regions with different languages begin to teach their children to speak at the same time (Lenneberg, 1967: 125). This regularity of onset naturally leads to the inference that language may be preprogrammed in human brain.Another impressive fact mon in different studies is that as the