Washoe (chimpanzee)

Washoe (c. September 1965 – October 30, 2007) was a chimpanzee who, it is claimed, was the first non-human to learn to speak a human language, that of American Sign Language. She also passed on some of her knowledge to her adopted son, Loulis. While her use of ASL is confirmed, whether that constituted a usage of language is still disputed.

As part of a research experiment on animal language acquisition, Washoe developed a modest ability to communicate with humans using ASL. She was named for Washoe County, Nevada, where she was raised and taught to use ASL. Washoe had lived at Central Washington University since 1980; on October 31, 2007, officials from the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute on the CWU campus announced that she had died the previous day at the age of 42.

Project Washoe

In 1967, Allen and Beatrice Gardner established a project to teach Washoe ASL at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the time, previous attempts to teach chimpanzees to imitate vocal languages (the Gua and Vicki projects) had failed. The Gardners believed that these projects were flawed because chimps are physically unable to produce the voiced sounds required for spoken language. Their solution was to utilize the chimpanzee's ability to create diverse body gestures by starting a language project based on American Sign Language.

ASL instruction and usage

To teach Washoe signs, the Gardners and their graduate students initially modeled their approach on operant conditioning methods. When Washoe would spontaneously make a gesture that in some way resembled an ASL sign, the scientists would shape the gesture by encouraging and rewarding variations of that gesture until it became a true ASL sign. For example, the sign for MORE is made by bringing ones hands together and touching the fingertips. In the context of tickling, Washoe would naturally bring her arms together to protect herself. Noticing the crude resemblance of this action to the sign for MORE, the Gardners would pull Washoe's arms apart and stop tickling. Washoe then tended to bring her arms together again, at which point the Gardens would reward her with more tickling. Over time, the Gardners required Washoe to be more precise with her arm and hand movements in order to elicit more tickling. Eventually, only the correct ASL would cause the Gardners to continue tickling. After Washoe learned to robustly construct the sign for MORE when being tickled, the Gardners introduced the sign in the context of a game of pulling Washoe around in a laundry basket. According to Roger Fouts, a graduate student of the Gardners, Washoe caught on quickly to the idea that the ASL sign for MORE could be used to get more of anything, including food, games, and books. In this way, the chimpanzee showed the ability to spontaneously generalize an abstract concept such as "MORE" to a variety of contexts in which training had not occurred.

After the first couple of years of the language project, the Gardners and Roger Fouts discovered that Washoe could pick up ASL gestures without operant conditioning methods by observing humans around her that were signing amongst themselves. For example, the scientists signed "Toothbrush" to each other while they brushed their teeth near her. At the time of observation, Washoe showed no signs of having learned the sign, but on a later occasion she reacted to the sight of a toothbrush by spontaneously producing the correct sign, thereby showing that she had in fact previously learned the ASL sign.

In addition to individual signs, Washoe displayed the ability to combine signs in novel and meaningful ways. For example, she referred to her toilet as DIRTY GOOD and the refrigerator as OPEN FOOD DRINK, even though the scientists around her always called them POTTY CHAIR and COLD BOX. Fouts has written that this type of linguistic modification is similar to tool modification of wild chimpanzees.

Confirmed ASL signs

It is reported that Washoe could reliably use about 250 signs. For Washoe to be considered "reliable" on a sign, it had to be seen by 3 different observers in 3 separate spontaneous instances in the correct context and used appropriately. Following those observations, it had to be seen 15 days in a row to be added to her sign list. These criteria were applied in the earlier phases of the project. However, there is a great deal of controversy as to whether such usage of ASL sign sequence would constitute flexible adaptation of ASL combination to proper context or mere rote learning of different sign sequence due to repeated conditioning. The former case means that Washoe can use language while the later case mean that Washoe learned many sign as a trick, which many other animals can doto various extents.

Other projects and controversy

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker believes that the argument that Washoe is the first non-human to acquire a human language is generally considered without scientific support (see Pinker, 1994).

Primate researcher Jane Goodall, who has lived with chimpanzees for decades, noted the importance of Roger Fouts' book Next of Kin, an account of his work with Washoe:

Roger, through his ongoing conservations with Washoe and her extended family, has opened a window into the cognitive workings of a chimpanzee's mind that adds new dimension to our understanding, articles.

A number of projects have sought to establish ASL or other forms of language in other chimpanzees and also in gorillas and bonobos, as well as in non-primate species such as dolphins, and parrots. In particular, the Nim Chimpsky project failed to replicate the results of Washoe with a chimpanzee in a more "classical" experimental setting, leading to a controversy as to which approach was more appropriate (see the relevant article for more details). It should be noted however, that these experiments, by placing the chimpanzees in a more "classical" setting did not give as much affection and attention to Nim. It is believed that, with human children, affection and feelings of love during childhood play a significant role in cognitive development. At the same time, classical setting would shield experiment from the danger of Clever Hans Effect, which is a major problem in animal cognition research.

Potential and limitation of other species' use of human languages is likely to come from an integration of the results of all these projects, rather than an essentially historical pursuit of what did or did not happen in Project Washoe.

The Washoe project will be seen as a milestone in the study of animal cognition if the same results can be reliably replicated by independent source which confirm the validity of its original result. On the other hand, the lack of independent corroboration would mean that the original experiment was somewhat faulty, probably due to Clever Hans effect, as suggested by Thomas Sebeok.

See also

• Animal intelligence
• Great ape language
• Koko (gorilla)
• Roger Fouts

References

• Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. Edited by R. Allen Gardner, Beatrix T. Gardner, Thomas E. Van Cantfort.
• Next of Kin: what chimpanzees have taught me about who we are. written by Roger Fouts. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997. ISBN 068814862X
• The language instinct: How the mind creates language. Written by Steven Pinker. New York: W. Morrow.
• The Dragons of Edens: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Written by Carl Sagan.

External links

• Friends of Washoe, a non-profit organization
• Summary of Project Washoe