[tt] NYT: Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42

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Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/science/01chimp.html

By BENEDICT CAREY

She spent her early years playing in the backyard of a small house
in Reno, Nev., learning American Sign Language from the scientists
who adopted her, and by age 5 she had mastered enough signs to
capture the worlds attention and set off a debate over nonhuman
primates ability to learn human language that continues to this
day.

But on Tuesday night, Washoe, a chimpanzee born in West Africa,
died after a short illness, said Mary Lee Jensvold, assistant
director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at
Central Washington University in Ellensburg, where Washoe had lived
and learned for more than two decades. The chimp died in bed at age
42, surrounded by staff members and other primates who had been
close to her, Dr. Jensvold said.

Scientists had tried without success to teach nonhuman primates to
imitate vocal sounds when R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix T. Gardner,
cognitive researchers, adopted the 10-month-old chimp from military
scientists in 1966. The Gardners, skeptical that other primates
could adequately speak human words, taught Washoe American Sign
Language, encouraging her gestures until she made signs that were
reliably understandable.

A 1969 report by the Gardners on Washoes progress opened up the
entire field: it was absolutely frontier-breaking work, said Duane
Rumbaugh, scientist emeritus at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, a
research center.

One claim, that Washoe signed water and bird upon seeing a swan was
like getting an S.O.S. from outer space, the Harvard psychologist
Roger Brown said at the time.

Language scientists around the world began their own projects, to
try to replicate and extend the Gardners findings. But the
excitement died down in the late 1970s, when Herbert Terrace, a
cognitive researcher at Columbia, published a report on a
chimpanzee he had been trying to teach language, named Nim
Chimpsky. Nim could learn signs, but did so primarily by imitating
teachers, Dr. Terrace found by reviewing videos of interactions.

There was no spontaneity, no real use of grammar, Dr. Terrace said.
He analyzed a video of Washoe, who learned about 130 signs, and
said he found evidence that she, too, was reacting to prompts, not
engaging in anything like human conversation.

Researchers altered their approach and began teaching with word
symbols, called lexigrams, in which symbols stand for words. They
also created environments in which animals learned as infants do,
first by imitation and later by observation by watching others
communicate, then trying it themselves.

Dr. Rumbaugh said a number of chimps and pygmy chimpanzees learned
this way and the evidence screams out that apes have a capacity for
a very basic dimension of language.

They dont get contracts to write books, he said, they dont get
invited to give talks, they dont vote and so on, but their
intellectual functioning overlaps in some ways with humans.

Many scientists still are not convinced. But all agree that Washoe,
named for the county in Nevada where she spent her early years,
prompted all the excitement and debate, even if she did not answer
all the questions her abilities raised.

A former student of the Gardners, Roger Fouts, and his wife,
Deborah, took Washoe in 1980 to Ellensburg, Wash., where she became
matriarch to three younger chimps, Loulis, Tatu and Dar. She had a
gentle touch with them, Dr. Jensvold said, and kept an eye on the
habits and footwear of her human companions.

She always checked out your shoes, and if you had new ones shed
sign for you to show them to her, Dr. Jensvold said. Then she might
sign something about the color. She was a real shoe lady that way.