In 1967 Roger Fouts, then a grad student at the University of Nevada at Reno, began working with psychologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner on a project to teach an infant chimpanzee to talk. The chimp, Washoe, had been captured in Africa for air force medical experiments. The Gardners had brought her home from a lab in New Mexico and were raising her almost like a human child. Washoe played with dolls, ate in a high chair, and was learning to “talk” using American Sign Language.
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In 1970 Fouts brought Washoe to Norman, Oklahoma, to continue experiments at the Institute for Primate Studies. There Washoe became the matriarch of a surrogate chimp family, teaching ASL to her adopted son Loulis. Other chimps took to signing abstract concepts like “more” and “less” and spontaneously used their limited vocabularies to name new objects, referring to a watermelon as “drink fruit,” a radish as “cry hurt food,” a cucumber as “green banana,” and Alka-Seltzer as “listen drink.”
Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace then conducted a study in which a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky was taught ASL in daily sessions of strict training in a windowless eight-by-eight-foot cell. The results were unimpressive, and Terrace concluded that Nim understood signs only as triggers to get rewards. Fouts countered that Terrace’s tightly controlled experiment deprived Nim of precisely the supportive social environment needed to learn language. Using remote cameras, Fouts later recorded hundreds of hours of videotape in which his chimps could be seen signing to each other when humans were absent. Biologists and anthropologists responded with enthusiasm, but many linguists, including Chomsky, remained unconvinced–even after Nim’s signing improved dramatically once he was allowed more normal social interaction. “Most of the critics don’t bother to look at the data,” Fouts says today. “Chomsky can’t afford to say, ‘My gosh, isn’t it wonderful I found out that for the past 35 years I’ve been barking up the wrong tree?’”
Fouts now devotes much of his time to his efforts to halt biomedical testing on chimps in the United States and destruction of their natural habitat in Africa. He believes research on chimpanzees should be restricted by the same ethics one would apply to human subjects. “We’ve had this human arrogance that they were here for our pleasure, but they’re not,” he says. “They should be recognized as persons.”
