What is the bottom line with Koko the gorilla’s ability to learn sign language? I know she only communicates through her handler, who seems to engage in a great deal of subjective translation. I saw an excerpt in Harper’s Magazine of a supposed Internet chat with Koko a few years ago that made me rather dubious that the gorilla was capable of any use of language. Nonetheless, there is a strong perception out there that Koko has learned to sign. What is the straight dope? –Fabian Braithwaite
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A couple obvious problems present themselves when one looks into this talking-ape business. The first, as you suggest, is that interpretation of the gorilla’s conversation, if such it be, is left to the handler, who generally sees any improbable concatenation of signs as deeply meaningful. During the 1998 on-line chat you saw bits of in Harper’s (the whole thing is at www.koko.org/world/talk_aol.html), for example, Koko, without being prompted or questioned, made the sign for nipple, which Francine Patterson, her trainer, interpreted as a rhyme for “people.” (Patterson further claimed that this was a reference to the chat session’s audience.) Even if you buy the idea that gorillas, who cannot speak, grasp the concept of rhyme, this sounds like wishful thinking. Similar examples abound: “lips” is supposedly Koko’s word for woman, “foot” her word for man. Koko made a lot of signs, and sometimes expressed desires or other thoughts, but nothing in the transcript suggests a sustained conversation, even of the simple sort you might have with a toddler.
Terrace’s work was a major blow to talking-ape proponents. But their case started looking stronger in 1990, when researcher Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of Georgia State University presented evidence of language development in a bonobo chimp named Kanzi. One of the more telling complaints made about gorillas like Koko who communicated via sign language was that they often babbled, producing long, apparently meaningless strings of signs. Their handlers would then pluck a few lucky hits from the noise and declare that communication had occurred. Savage-Rumbaugh got around this problem by teaching Kanzi to point to printed symbols on a keyboard, a less ambiguous approach. She claimed that the ape demonstrated a rough grasp of grammar using this system. What’s more, when presented with 653 sentences making requests using novel word combinations, Kanzi responded correctly 72 percent of the time–supposedly comparable to what a human child can do at two and a half years old.
