The purpose of using a primate in this study was because they are supposedly our closest relatives on the evolutionary scale, so they must have similar psychological abilities as us. So if they could learn language then it would strengthen the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. It was noticed in earlier studies that it. Gardner and Gardner noticed that the even though primates could not speak they could make gestures with their hands almost exactly the same as humans. This aim of Gardner and Gardner was to see whether a chimp could be taught to use human sign language, which contains all the features of human spoken language.
This longitudinal study started in June 1966 and continued for 22 months. Washoe was a wild caught female chimp aged between eight and fourteen months old. She was brought up in a fully humanised environment with companions, her environment was rich with simulation (toys, games), and routines (bathing, feeding and dressing). All these things are believed to be important in children’s language development. The teachers never spoke to her and only ever used American Sign Language (ASL), every sound made for example a laugh or bang on a drum had to be able to be imitated by Washoe. Washoe was trained with conditioning techniques. She would imitate actions but not always when asked or in the appropriate situation. The trainers would tickle her as a reward (reinforcement) for that behaviour. If she made a sign that was not accurate her trainers would aim to get her to produce a better sign by shaping her fingers, if Washoe failed to use a new sign in an appropriate situation, or used another incorrect sign then the trainers would make the correct sign to Washoe, repeating the performance until she made the sign herself. For up to sixteen months they kept a full record signing, after a while they introduced a system where they only recorded a new sign after three different observers had seen it used in the right context with no prompting, the sign that was said to be ‘acquired’ when it had been used appropriately and spontaneously on 15 consecutive days. Careful observation was also made of they way in which Washoe combined the signs, as it was a part of the development of grammatical understanding.
By 22 months Washoe had a vocabulary of about 30 words that met the criteria. Once she had about 8-10 signs in her vocabulary she started to combine them. She also learnt to differentiate new signs, she learned the sign flower and used it to indicate smell. But she still had problems with the order of the words, many signs were only understood due to the context in which they were produced.
Although Washoe developed a number of basic abilities, which indicated that perhaps she was beginning to develop what has been defined as ‘language’, she needed external reinforcers, which human children do not need. It is almost undisputable that Washoe displayed semancity, she was able to generalise from one situation to another e.g. ‘open’ and ‘more’, and some times she over generalised e.g. ‘hurt’. There is also some limited evidence of displacement, as when she asked for an absent object or person e.g. ‘all gone cup’/’more milk’. And once she had mastered eight to ten signs she showed creativity by combining them, for example ‘gimme tickle’ (come and tickle me) and ‘go sweet’ (take me to the Raspberry bush). Although she combined some signs in a consistent order e.g.’ tickle me’ instead of ‘me tickle’, she did no always seem to care about sign order, she was likely to sign ‘go sweet’ as ‘sweet go’. So the evidence for structure dependence is much weaker.
This may be down to four reasons as Aitchison (1983) suggested. The Gardner’s over eagerness may have led them to reward Washoe every time she correctly signed regardless of the order they were in, so the importance of order was never learnt, it could be easier to preserve the order of word in speech rather than in sign as shown in deaf adults who are also inconsistent with their word order. The early results may have been her intermediate stage, before she actually learnt to keep to a fixed order. The last suggestion was that she did not understand the essentially patterned nature of language.
Although chimpanzees have been taught simple communication, it seems to lack the development shown by a human child and does not match the criteria specified by Aitchison (1983) and other theorists. However the ethnocentricity of the original definition must not be forgotten.
There are certain strengths to this study as well. Gardner and Gardner were able to keep their focus directly on Washoe, as there were no other chimps being watched. So her development could have been monitored very precisely. There are ethical issues relate to this study as well. Washoe was captured from the wild to be studied for just 22 months, as it was such a short time it is not a justified excuse to take a chimpanzee out of its national habitat. She was put into completely artificial surroundings, there was nothing of her natural surroundings at all. Also what happened to Washoe or other such chimps after the experiments, it would not be fair to a chip brought up in a totally human environment with only human companionship, to be put into a cage with other chimps and none of its familiar surroundings that it was brought up in. Washoe would also if put back into a natural environment she wouldn’t be able to survive, and would not know how to communicate with other chimps as she only knew ASL. The study was supposed to see if chimpanzees could learn human language, but as a consequence Washoe was expected to live and act like a human. It is these reasons why I think that the study was not ethical, infact no effort was made to make it ethical. Any way in which you try and teach an animal language is unethical since they are removed from their natural habitat in which they do not spontaneously use language.
This study does show us that it is useful in our understanding of psychology, because it proves that language is both due to nature and nurture, but it is unfortunate that the study took away a chimp from the wild, and possibly caused Washoe distress. Hopefully psychologists have learned from this experiment and others that chimps should be treated as living beings and as having rights.
