ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the story of Roger Fouts. His job is teaching a chimpanzee to talk. Desperate for the job and intrigued by the idea, Fouts accepted the position and so began his lifetime work with a chimp called Washoe. Washoe was the first non-human animal to acquire a human language. Fouts went on to advocate that all animal research should be abolished and that included his own. Given what he has discovered about chimpanzee behaviour and culture, Fouts argues that it is entirely wrong to be conducting research on them in the way that many laboratories continue to do. The Gardners believed that since chimpanzees were human's nearest relatives, they might have an innate capacity for language. Perhaps the most popular psychological theory to explain learning was that proposed by B. F. Skinner. He suggested that language learning could be explained by operant conditioning, namely, that behaviour is shaped by the consequences of the behaviour.
