Communication between apes and humans. During the last hundred years, there have been several attempts to engage in some form of intelligible speech with apes. Richard L. Garner spent many years analyzing the sounds made by apes and eventually claimed to be able to talk to monkeys in their language. He published several books, The Speech of Monkeys (1892), Gorillas and Chimpanzees (1896), and Apes and Monkeys (1900), claiming considerable success. However, nobody since that time has been able to reproduce his results.
Primate studies in recent years have taken a different tack, taking very young chimpanzees and developing a shared sign language. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada taught American sign language to the chimpanzee Washoe, who became famous. Washoe developed a large vocabulary of signs, which it appeared to use with impressive fluency, not merely responding to and replicating but apparently developing a limited syntax, the use of a basic grammar. Other researchers entered this apparently fruitful held. The gorilla Koko described a zebra as a white tiger. Herbert Terrace trained a chimp named Nim Chimpsky (a variation on the name of the famous linguist Noam Chomsky) to use sign language, which it did with extraordinary facility. But on closer examination, Ter¬ race decided that Nim was neither employing a language nor had any understanding of the meaning of the signs, much less of the grammar, but had learned to imitate his teacher to obtain rewards; that is he was behaving like Clever Hans. Terrace’s work has cast doubt on the other apes’ sign language achievements. Terrace’s conclusions are contested, and primate researchers will continue to explore this subject.