LET's TALK TO THE ANIMALS

A sign of the antiquity of body language and its supremacy

over the spoken word has come from the studies of

a husband and wife team of researchers, R. Allen and

Beatrice T. Gardner of the University of Nevada.

Pondering the many failures of psychologists to teach

the anthropoid apes to speak, the Gardners decided to try

gestures instead. Body language is a natural part of all

animal behaviour, they reasoned, and apes are familiar

enough with body language to learn to use gestures for

communication. This is particularly true of anthropoid

apes, because they are imitative and manually dextrous.

The Gardners decided to teach a young female

chimpanzee named Washoe the sign language used by the

deaf in North America. The chimp was given the freedom

of the Gardner house along with toys and large doses of

tender loving care, and she was surrounded by humans

who used only sign language to communicate.

Washoe, in true chimp fashion, very quickly imitated

her human friends' sign-language gestures, but it took

months of patient work before she could reproduce them

on command. She was urged to ' speak up' by touching

her hand, and any 'faulty diction' was improved by repeating the 

sign in an exaggerated way. When Washoe

learned a sign correctly she was rewarded with tickling.

If she was forced to work too hard, she would rebel by

running away or throwing a tantrum or by biting her teacher's hand.

After two years of patient work, Washoe learned

about thirty signs. She was judged to have learned a sign

if she used it of her own accord in a proper fashion at

least once each day for fifteen days. Washoe learned to

bring her fingertips over her head to signal 'more', to

shake her open hand at the wrist for 'hurry' and to draw

her palm across her chest for 'please'.

She also learned the signs for hat, shoes, trousers and

other articles of clothing, and the signs for baby, dog and

cat. Surprisingly enough, she used these latter signs for

new babies, dogs or cats when she met them. Once she

even used the sign for dog when she heard a bark. She

has also invented some simple sentences: 'Go sweet'

when she wants to be carried to a raspberry bush, and

'Open food drink' when she wants something from the

refrigerator.

The experiment is still continuing, and Washoe is

learning new gestures and putting them into new sentences.

The old Dr Dolittle idea of talking to the animals

may yet be possible with body language.

However, some blase naturalists point out that body

language among animals is no new thing. Birds signal

sexual willingness by elaborate courtship dances, bees

signal the direction of a honey supply by involved flight

patterns and dogs will indulge in a host of signals from

rolling over and playing dead to sitting up and begging

for food.

What is new in the case of Washoe is the teaching of a

language to an animal, and the animal's initiation of signs

in that language. It is logical that the deaf sign language

should have succeeded where a spoken language failed.

Loss of hearing and the cutting off of the world of sound

apparently make an individual much more sensitive to the

world of gestures and motions. If this is so, then someone

who is deaf should have a more sensitive understanding of

body language.