Speech Production Experiments

Many years ago, attempts were made to teach chimpanzees spoken language. Hayes and Hayes (1952) gave Vicki, their young chimpanzee, intensive training in language, but she only learnt to produce four sounds and unfortunately none of them was used in a language-like way.

The Kelloggs (1968) raised a young chimpanzee called Gua together with their son Donald, but unlike the child the ape never learnt to speak.

It is now known that these projects were doomed from the beginning, in so far as that the chimpanzee's vocal tract is simply not adapted to produce human speech or anything like it.