| Sumario: | A study was conducted to determine whether three apes, in their spontaneous choice of lexigrams for communication, indicate the existence of two mathematically identified, expressive language structures recently discovered in human word usage. Two distinctive and unrelated measures of word usage—one involving the waiting time between the invocation of new words and the other involving the cumulative complexity of sequences of words—were used to develop a series of consistent and meaningful results across a diverse sample of human and ape productions. Findings indicate that both apes and humans seem to have two deep structures, one stochastic and the other deterministic, that constrain and silently regulate the selection of words and their accumulated complexity. These structures have no relation to the nature of the individual words and their meanings, but they pertain to the issues of richness, repetition, and originality of language use. It is concluded that apes possess deep, natural, unlearned expressive language structures that are comparable to those seen in humans.
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