Cross-species Technology PC Week - 08/02/99 - page 9 Apes speak through computers Researchers at Georgia State University are giving apes a voice. The school's Language Research Center is using flexible flat-panel displays hooked into speech recognition software to teach a group of chimpanzees and other apes to express themselves in sentences, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported last week. The touch-sensitive display presents the primates with hundreds of symbols representing words or concepts in their vocabulary. The animals are learning to touch the symbols in sequence to form simple sentences, researchers said. The center's prize pupil, a bonobo chimpanzee named Panbanisha, knows about 3,000 individual words, the report said. The LRC's work aims to increase understanding of the role of development, language and environment during child rearing, the BBC said. http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/index.html Caption: Kanzi readies for a speech lesson.