A chimpanzee whose ability to learn American Sign Language suggested but did not prove that the animal could engage in humanlike conversation died on Tuesday, The New York Times reported today. The ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. Listen 0:00 Back in the 1970s, a ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it’s difficult to prove a negative like this because we’ll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

He and his wife and collaborator made headlines with their finding that they could communicate with a young ape using the language of the deaf. By Sam Roberts Washoe was 10 months old when her foster ...

Robert with Onan signing "hat". Source: Robert Ingersoll, with permission. I recently learned of a book by Robert Ingersoll and Antonina Anna Scarnà titled Primatology, Ethics, and Trauma: The ...

She spent her early years playing in the backyard of a small house in Reno, Nev., learning American Sign Language from the scientists who adopted her. By age 5, she had mastered enough signs to ...

Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic ...

Humans are known to invent private hand gestures. Chimps in the wild do, too, a new study suggests. By Brandon Keim Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some ...

Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents began teaching her to talk, and five months later they were already trumpeting her success. Not only had she learned words; she could also string them ...