Washoe and her mates were able to combine the hundreds of signs that they learned into novel combinations (that they had never been taught, but rather created themselves) with different meanings. For instance, when Washoe's mate Moja didn't know the word for "thermos", Moja referred to it as a "METAL CUP DRINK".[22] However, whether or not Washoe's combinations constitute genuine inventive language is controversial, as Herbert S. Terrace contended by concluding that seeming sign combinations did not stand for a single item, but rather were three individual signs.[23] Taking the thermos example, rather than METAL CUP DRINK being a composite meaning thermos, it could be that Washoe was indicating there was an item of metal (METAL), one shaped like a cup (CUP), and that could be drunk out of (DRINK). This ambiguity is reminiscent of human languages including Chinese and Japanese, where a sequence of two or three words starts out as a phrase but gradually comes to be regarded as a single word.
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