Chimpanzee Talk

Paper Summary:

The paper describes the ongoing interest to chimpanzee's language ability, although they are a largely non-verbal species, who communicate by way of gestures. The paper explains that efforts to teach chimpanzees to speak, as they are almost 100 per cent genetically similar to Homo sapiens, are hoped to produce knowledge of human language acquisition, in the beginning and subjects of language development.

From the Paper:

"Marcel Danesi summarized post-World War II efforts to teach chimpanzees to speak, led by the 1960s research of Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada, that centered on their female subject "Washoe" which commenced when the chimpanzee was almost one year of age. (2004: 42, Gardner:1975) Washoe proved capable of using 132 signs of American Sign Language (ASL) within five years. Moreover, Washoe could combine signs to express sets of syntactic relations. The same was accomplished by four other chimpanzees taught ASL that, along with Washoe, were analyzed by Roger S. Fouts. (1996)"

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