The Ape Within Us

Viki: An Experiment In Acquiring Language And Culture

The quest to determine whether an ape could acquire language and culture was furthered by Keith and Cathy Hayes, behavioral psychologists working at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in the late 1940’s. Unlike Kellogg, the Hayes’ had no children and raised Viki, an infant chimpanzee, without siblings.

The original hope was that Viki would learn to speak. However, when it became clear that Viki was showing no spontaneous inclinations at all in that regard, shaping sessions were introduced. During these sessions, Keith Hayes held Viki’s lips in various positions and rewarded her for making implosive breathy sounds at the same moment. Viki gained voluntary control over her ability to produce these sounds, but not over the lip/tongue control to produce interpretable speech. Eventually, Viki began to mold her own sounds by manually controlling her own lip movements instead of allowing someone to do this for her. Through laborious effort, Viki acquired four words — mama, cup, papa and up. The implosive “p” sound in each word was produced in the manner described above. This was not easy to do as it required Viki to utilize her entire body to produce the implosive air burst while coordinating this with her ability to hold her lips closed momentarily to block the air.

Although speech seemed difficult for her, Viki, like Gua, began to understand some spoken language. For example, she would rush to the door when it was announced that the family was about to go for a ride in the car. She was able to assist in dressing herself, to sort objects and photos into categories with very little assistance or training. Unfortunately, Viki died of viral meningitis at the age of seven.

The question of whether or not a chimpanzee with language would also become a cultured being remained unanswered.

Washoe: An Experiment In Acquiring Language And Culture

The first major breakthrough in the quest to understand the limits of chimpanzee mind and the influence of language was made by Beatrix and Allen Gardner. In 1966, the Gardners began the first ape language project to break from the tradition of trying to get apes to speak.

Beatrice’s background in ethology led her to believe that learning followed certain predisposed paths and that no amount of shaping could bring some behaviors into existence. Observing the Hayes’ films revealed that while shaping techniques did not produce speech, they were effective in teaching Viki such things as “touch your nose,” etc. This suggested that shaping the hands of an infant chimpanzee might hold far more potential than techniques for shaping mouth and tongue movements. Thus, the Gardners decided to rear Washoe, a young female chimpanzee, in a homelike environment, but to expose her to hand signs rather than spoken language.

Washoe’s environment was monitored around the clock and notes were made on a wide range of behaviors as well as all signed utterances. All those around Washoe were asked to use signs in every communication and were forbidden to speak in Washoe’s presence.

Unlike the Hayes’, the Gardners did not take Washoe into their home. Washoe stayed in a trailer during the day and slept there alone at night. While the Gardners devoted love and attention to Washoe in their spare time, the task of rearing young Washoe fell to an array of graduate students and short-term caretakers. The decision to provide Washoe with a human world, but not a human family represented a significant departure from the earlier studies.

When the Gardners realized that Washoe was not going to acquire language in a spontaneous fashion, they introduced sign training. This consisted of showing Washoe an object, demonstrating the sign, then taking Washoe’s hands and molding them into the proper hand configuration for the sign. Slowly, the molding was less emphasized until Washoe produced the sign on her own. This procedure resulted in rapid sign acquisition and Washoe quickly surpassed Vickie’s attainment of four spoken utterances.

The Gardners assumed the ability to produce a sign implied the ability to comprehend what others intended with the use of a sign. When it was revealed that Washoe had acquired 30 signs and was rapidly on her way to learning many more, a languaged ape, it seemed, had finally arrived.

The Gardners’ success, achieved by altering the paradigm from spoken words to signs, shocked the established academic world. Suddenly there arose a great interest in determining whether Washoe was a “genius” or whether this ability could present itself in other apes.