W.N. Kellogg, associate professor of psychology at Indiana University, outlined the plan for his Ape and Child experiment in a Psychological Review (1931b) article:
Suppose an anthropoid were taken into a typical human family at the day of birth and reared as a child. Suppose he were fed upon a bottle, clothed, washed, bathed, fondled, and given a characteristically human environment; that he were spoken to like the human infant from the moment of parturition; that he had an adopted human mother and an adopted human father…. The experimental situation par excellence should indeed be attained if this technique were refined one step farther by adopting such a baby ape into a human family with one child of approximately the ape’s age.
That’s just what Kellogg and his wife did, raising a young female chimpanzee, named Gua, with their son, Donald.
Gua learned to behave as a human, to a point, and could comprehend English commands:
Surprising as it may seem, the ape was considerably superior to the child in responding to human words. Gua began to recognize the voices of individuals, thereafter probably the articulation of simple words. Gua first learned the command “no-no”, and her second command and learned response was “kiss-kiss”.Toward the middle of the nine-month period, the sudden development of the child enabled him to equal and then surpass Gua in respect to the number of words and phrases he comprehended. The responses which Donald and Gua made to language stimuli are well established reactions of comprehension. At the end of the nine-month period the comprehension vocabulary of Donald were 107 words and phrases; Gua’s was 95 words and phrases.