 In 1992 they founded at CWU the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI), a sanctuary for chimpanzees.CHCI is dedicated to the protection of chimpanzees, the education of students and public alike.Recent research at CHCI focused on the private signing of the chimpanzees, imaginary play and signing, chimpanzee to chimpanzee conversations, conversation repair, representational drawing, and the symbolic representation of spatial relations with ASL signs as well as a comparison of gestural dialects in this population of captive chimpanzees and three populations of free-living chimpanzees.