She used her
ethological training background and applied it to
psychobiology at
Wellesley College, where she was hired to teach after Oxford. At Wellesley, Beatrice met
Allen Gardner. They met when they both attended a talk being given by
Harry Harlow on his studies of contact comfort in infant
rhesus macaque monkeys. In 1966, the Gardner and her husband acquired a 10-month-old chimpanzee that they named
Washoe, Dr. Gardner was successful in teaching Washoe to use 250 different ASL signs, and she was able to use them in novel configurations. Due to the success of the project, Gardner continued to expand it by obtaining four infant chimpanzees named Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar. Gardner wanted to begin the sign language training from younger than 10 months old, which was Washoe's age when she was first acquired. She also wanted to raise these infant apes alongside each other to determine whether cultural transmission of signing would occur, or whether the apes would use sign language to communicate with one another. At this point, Washoe moved to the Institute of Primate Studies in
Norman, Oklahoma, under the care of Roger and Deborah Fouts, who were two of the original researchers that had helped to raise Washoe. In 1980, Washoe moved with the Fouts to
Ellensburg, Washington, where she lived out her life until she died in 2007 at the age of 42.
Controversy There were several skeptics of the language training that Gardner was working on with Washoe. Not everyone believed that Washoe was truly using "language". Rather, they believed that Washoe was communicating using symbols that she associated with specific rewards, and they claimed that is why she would not use them conversationally.
Herbert Terrace, a
cognitive scientist at
Columbia University, attempted to replicate the success of Washoe's training with another chimpanzee named
Nim Chimpsky. Nim was able to learn ASL, but was raised in a true "laboratory" environment. This meant that instead of being raised in a nurturing and affectionate environment that many would argue is essential for human child development (and how Washoe was raised), Nim was raised in a controlled environment that lacked this component. Terrace claimed that Nim never spontaneously produced signs, nor did he use any grammar rules while signing. He was only able to communicate for food rewards. ==Honors and awards==