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Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents started teaching her to speak, and five months later they were already starting to announce her success. He not only learned the words; he could also link them together by forming phrases such as “waterfowl” when he saw a pair of swans, and “waterfowl” when he saw an “open flower” to enter a garden.

Washoe was a chimpanzee.

Born in West Africa, possibly orphaned when his mother was killed, he was sold to a dealer, flown to the United States to be tested by the Air Force, and adopted by R. Allen Gardner and his wife. beatrix. He was raised like a human child. She wanted onion oatmeal and pumpkin pudding.

“The goal of our research was to find out how human-like chimpanzees are,” Professor Gardner told Nevada Today, a 2007 University of Nevada publication. To do that, we needed to share a common language.”

Washoe eventually learned about 200 words and became the first non-human to communicate using sign language developed for the deaf, as the researchers say.

Professor Gardner, an ethologist who trained chimpanzees with his wife for nearly five years, died on August 20 at his farm near Reno, Nev. He was 91 years old.

His death was announced by the University of Nevada, Reno, where he joined the faculty in 1963 and continued his research until his retirement in 2010.

In 1967, the news excited the world of psychologists and ethologists who study animal behavior when scientific journals reported that Washoe (pronounced WA-sho), named after a county in Nevada, had learned to recognize and use multiple gestures and expressions in sign language.

Childless, the Gardners raised a young monkey on their farm in its early years.

His ability to create simple phrases like making the “I, Washoe” sign when looking in a mirror was a linguistic feat that Harvard psychologist Roger Brown told The New York Times was like “receiving an SOS from outer space.”

“Absolutely cross-border business” Duane M. Rumbaugh, an honorary scientist at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, said retrospectively in 2007.

Gardners’ findings challenged the premise that humans are uniquely equipped to express themselves through language. His research has also expanded educators’ understanding of how children learn language and how to apply that knowledge to people with learning difficulties.

Evidence of the Gardners’ early communication with Washoe has been viewed with skepticism by some researchers.

Herbert S. TerraceA cognitive psychologist at Columbia University said at the time—and he repeated in a recent email—that only humans can speak spontaneously and use grammar, the two main pillars of language.

He said his own analysis found that “many of the chimpanzee’s markings are the work of unconscious cues from their teachers” and not spontaneously.

However, the Gardners were able to repeat their research with four additional baby chimpanzees.

Further work by the couple and other researchers showed that while chimpanzees and bonobos lack adequate physical control over their tongues, lips, and larynx – using various communication methods such as identifying objects with symbols and pressing buttons instead of signing them – they do not have sufficient physical control to speak aloud. Humans had the ability to understand the concept of a word and learn languages, and could converse using hand signals.

Robert Allen Goldberg, known as Allen, was born on February 21, 1930, in Brooklyn. (It is not clear when his surname changed.) His father Milton George Goldberg, an industrial engineer and once a bootlegger. His mother was May (Klein) Goldberg. little brother, plant gardnerwould become famous as a playwright.

His family took Allen with them while they were distributing illegal liquor, assuming the police wouldn’t suspect a couple with a baby.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1950, a master’s degree from Columbia in 1951, and a doctorate from Northwestern University in 1954, where he studied learning theory under an educational psychologist. Benton J. Underwood.

He served as a research psychologist in the army and taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where he met Beatrix (sometimes spelled Beatrice) Tugendhut, a teacher known as Trixie, at a lecture on love by psychologist Harry Harlow.

They married in 1961 and moved to the University of Nevada, who is also a psychologist and zoologist, and became his research collaborator. HE died in 1995.

No immediate family member survives.

Professor Gardner co-founded the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Nevada in 1984 and was its director from 1990 to 1993.

In 1965 he encouraged Roger Fouts, a psychology student, to begin his doctoral thesis showing that Washoe’s capacity to communicate approached the level of small human children.

However, the Gardners concluded that the only way to relate monkey developmental skills to those of children was to create a comparable environment and treat monkey subjects as foster children.

The Gardners published their first results in the journal Science in 1967 and presented them to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New York.

In 1974, Washoe appeared on the PBS science series “Nova.” In 1989 the Gardners published the book Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. In 1998, three years after his wife died, Professor Gardner published another collaborative work, “The Structure of Learning: From Signal Stimuli to Sign Language.”

washoe lived with the Gardners By age 5, he then moved to the Central Washington University Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Ellensburg, Wash. died in 2007 at 42.