2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Teaching sign language to the chimpanzee,gorilla and orangutan

Washoe: the first signing chimp

In 1966, another husband-and-wife team of psychologists, Allen and Beatrice Gardner (1969, 1975), began to teach sign language to a baby chimp, a female they called Washoe (rhymes with ‘show’). They reasoned that any attempt to teach chimps to speak was doomed to failure because of the simple fact that chimps do not possess the necessary vocal apparatus for human speech. Viki’s failure to learn to speak could plausibly be said to be

a simple physiological failure and not a mental one. Since chimps are very adept at using their hands, the Gardners conceived of the idea of teaching them a simplified form of American Sign Language (ASL).

One of Washoe’s early signs was ‘open’, which is expressed by a throw- ing out of the arms. After about four years with the Gardners, Washoe learned a vocabulary of about 130 signs and, according to the Gardners, displayed two- and three-word utterances, such as, ‘Go sweet’, when she wanted to be taken to the raspberry bushes, and ‘Open food drink’, when she wanted something out of the refrigerator. The two- or three-word length of utterance seems to be similar to that produced by human children around the age of 1 to 2 years. The Gardners, unfortunately, did not focus on comprehension.

The Gardners give the impression that the language of the signing ape and that of the signing child are very similar. In one study, they go so far as to claim the ape to be superior to the child. However, as Premack (1971, 1976) and other researchers have noted, after four years Washoe’s achieve- ment never advanced beyond its very elementary level. In contrast, by the age of 4, ordinary children have learned over a thousand words and they can comprehend and produce sentences on the basis of an abstract syntax that includes negations, questions, etc. Hearing-impaired children who have learned ASL from infancy also acquire a similarly high level of language knowledge.

Yet, despite the many years of training and exposure to sign language that Washoe experienced, she could not advance beyond an elementary level   of human achievement. But even the claims for this elementary level have been questioned. Many of the gestures that the Gardners recorded as signs seem to have already been part of the chimpanzees’ natural gesture system, such as shaking the hand at the wrist for ‘hurry’. These gestures were among the most frequent of the signs used by Washoe and were often included in her two- and three-word utterances. Concerning such word combinations, it is not clear whether they were actual reliable syntactic combinations rather than single signs formed in close proximity to each other.

Loulis, son of Washoe, and a community of signing chimps

After a number of years, Washoe was moved to a facility in the state of Washington and became part of the research conducted by Roger and Debby Fouts (Fouts, 1973; Fouts et al., 1989), another research couple, who were working with a number of chimps. The Fouts regard their chimp subjects fondly and have established a primate reserve where chimps are taught some of the rudiments of human culture, such as using tools, for example, with the aim that they start their own community.

The Fouts’ primary interest is in looking at how language may or may not develop in the social context of such a community. Thus, their emphasis is placed on creating the best environment for chimpanzees to develop conversations and not on teaching them syntax (Fouts, 1983a). One particu- lar interest of theirs was Washoe’s ‘adopted’ son, Loulis, who, they say, learned signs from Washoe (Fouts et al., 1989).

However, Washoe’s signs seem not to have been picked up by chimps other than Loulis, who unfortunately died when still very young. As yet, this line of research has not provided strong evidence for the creation and learning of signs from chimpanzee to chimpanzee.

5.2.3         Nim Chimpsky and the Chimpskyan revolution

The optimism of animal language researchers in the 1960s turned sour in the 1970s when Terrace (Terrace, 1979a, 1979b; Terrace et al., 1979), a psy- chologist who was an early enthusiast of chimps being able to learn sign language, worked with a chimp that he named Nim Chimpsky. By giving the chimp this name, Terrace evidently set out to make a monkey out of Noam Chomsky by proving that animals can learn language. (It is a quote from Terrace that we used to start this chapter.) Chomsky has argued that only humans have language. Just who was made a monkey’s uncle is the question we will now consider.

Like the Gardners, Terrace used a modified form of American Sign Language for teaching language to Nim. Initially he reported positive findings: ‘I felt that I had the best evidence of anyone that in a very primi- tive sentence a chimpanzee could combine two or more signs according to  a particular grammatical rule very much as a young child might’ (Terrace, 1983). Examples of Nim’s two-, three-, and four-sign sequences are ‘more drink’, ‘tickle Nim’, ‘banana Nim eat’, ‘banana eat Nim’, ‘eat drink eat drink’, and ‘banana me eat banana’.

However, by the time the project ended, Terrace had radically changed his mind about Nim’s grammatical abilities. After studying the research video tapes, Terrace concluded that Nim, knowing that he had to make signs in order to get what he wanted, would take some of what the teacher signed and give the appearance of producing structured two- or three-word utterances, without producing a consistent subject-verb or verb-subject word order. When Nim made longer utterances, Terrace says that all he was doing was mainly imitating what the teacher signed and adding words almost at random until he got what he wanted. (Terrace’s examples in the previous paragraph seem to bear this out.) Terrace thus came to the con- clusion that chimpanzees were capable of learning only a few of the most elementary aspects of language.

The most important clue  as  to  why  a  chimpanzee  does  not  advance to producing long utterances, in Terrace’s view, is that its demands can