Customer Reviews

Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

R. Allen Gardner and wife Beatrix T. Gardner are professors of comparative psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and most famous for conducting Project Washoe, an attempt to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee. They state in the Preface to this 1989 book, "Until now, our reports have usually taken the form of relatively short, highly compressed atricles in widely scattered professional books and journals with much of the background detail sacrificed to save space. This volume began as a way of collecting earlier reports and publishing them together with the most recent findings in one easily accessible space."

The Gardners are highly critical of "Project Nim" at Columbia: "The poor results of Project Nim at Columbia University are puzzling until the methods of Project Nim are compared with the methods of the Reno laboratory. After Nim left Columbia he went to the University of Oklahoma where he found human conversational partners who followed Roger Fouts' procedures rather than the operational rigor and drill of the Columbia laboratory."

They state, "In our view, it is the obligatory attachment of vocal behavior to emotional state that makes it so difficult, perhaps impossible, for chimpanzees to speak English words. They can, however, use their hands in the arbitrary connection between signs and referents." They used a method they called "molding" (i.e., "to take their hands and mold them into the sign while putting them through the movement") to teach signs to Washoe.

They note that Washoe's "adopted son" Loulis "acquired signing and other skills from Washoe and the younger chimpanzees in his community."

They conclude, "The possibility then arises that there is a continuum in nature---even primate nature: what the human infant also experiences between birth and later childhood may result from human (and primate) cognitive abilities plus interacton with others, and not from a genetic 'black box.'"