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Washoe (c. September 1965 – October 30, 2007) was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using signs adapted from American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition.
A critic of the ape language research organized a "Clever Hans" conference in 1980 trumpeting the Nim study and suggesting that scientists working on animal language were charlatans. [42] To Irene Pepperburg , a research associate who had been working with a parrot named Alex , the conference came as a wakeup call, pushing her to avoid claims ...
Animal languages are forms of communication between animals that show similarities to human language. [1] Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds and movements. Signing among animals may be considered a form of language if the inventory of signs is large enough.
Nim Chimpsky [1] (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee used in a study to determine whether chimps could learn a human language, American Sign Language (ASL). The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace of Columbia University with linguistic analysis by psycholinguist Thomas Bever .
The language designed by Premack for an ape was not verbal; Premack's chimpanzee program differed from that of a separate research program in which other chimpanzees were raised in a human family in parallel with human babies, and taught words. [2] Eventually, the chimpanzees might get to a two-year-old human's list of words, but no further.
However, further experiments in which chimpanzees were instructed in the use of American sign language indicated that Viki's achievements had been significantly hampered by physiological limitations—chimpanzees are not able to produce the sounds that make up human speech. Viki lived like a human, even with a human sibling, for three years ...
Sarah was one of nine chimpanzees in David Premack's psychology laboratory in Pennsylvania. Sarah was born in Africa in 1959. She first worked in Missouri, then in Santa Barbara, and then Pennsylvania. She first was exposed to language token training in 1967. Sarah, along with three other chimpanzees, were exposed to language token training.
Funding for the ape language experiments disappeared seemingly overnight. [23] Though other scientists severed ties with their apes after funding dried up, Patterson maintained responsibility for Koko. Most of the chimps who worked with Terrace, Allen and Beatrix Gardner were sold to medical labs for testing. [24]