Monday, November 05, 2007
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Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42
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.

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