Vicki

Virginia and Keith Hayes (1952) gave Vicki, their young chimpanzee, intensive training in language use. They taught her by using an imitation set: whenever Vicki responded to the order "do this, Vicki" by imitating the experimenter's actions, she was rewarded. The ape learned many skills in her brief life, but she only learned about four sounds ("Mama", "Papa", "cup", "up"), and none of them was very language-like in use (Hayes and Nissen, 1971).