Washoe dies at 42 without signing good-bye

[Joel S. Berson]

We have now lost within the last two months two of the world's most
well-known non-human talkers -- Washoe, at 42, and Alex (the African
grey parrot, aged 31, of Dr. Irene Pepperberger).  Can they be made
honorary members of ADL?

Joel

At 11/2/2007 02:44 PM, Dennis Baron wrote:
>There's a new post on the
>Web of Language:
>
>Washoe dies at 42 without signing good-bye
>
>Washoe, the chimpanzee who learned American Sign Language in the
>1960s, died after a short illness on Oct. 30, 2007, at the age of 42,
>at her home on the campus of Central Washington University....
>
>Humans have been fascinated with the idea of talking animals at least
>since the days of Aesop....
>
>There was a brief flurry of excitement in the 1970s over the
>possibility, now discredited, that plants would also respond to kind
>words by growing, which was their version of communicating.....
>
>observers were skeptical about the chimp's abilities, arguing that
>Washoe never used signs either creatively or spontaneously, but
>merely mimicked her trainers' cues, much like the early 20th-century
>carnival horse known as Clever Hans, who entertained crowds by
>working simple arithmetic problems until a psychologist proved that
>he was really watching his trainer's unconscious body language to
>signal the right answer....
>
>After Washoe's early success, researchers tried signing with other
>primates.  Penny Patterson began teaching Koko the gorilla to sign in
>1972, and Koko reportedly mastered anywhere from 350 to 1,000 words.
>The San Francisco Zoo's most famous great ape was the subject of a
>1978 movie by Barbet Schroeder and a more recent PBS documentary, "A
>Conversation with Koko." ...
>
>read all of this post at
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>Dennis Baron
>Professor of English and Linguistics
>Department of English
>University of Illinois
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