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<h2 class="gmail-blog__title">Koko Is Dead, but the Myth of Her Linguistic Skills Lives On</h2>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_53131" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-aligncenter" style="width:690px"><a href="http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/files/2018/06/Screen-Shot-2018-06-27-at-12.23.31-PM.png"><img class="gmail-size-chronicle-full-width gmail-wp-image-53131" alt="Screen Shot 2018-06-27 at 12.23.31 PM" src="http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/files/2018/06/Screen-Shot-2018-06-27-at-12.23.31-PM-680x432.png" width="680" height="432"></a><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><small> Ron Cohn/Courtesy of the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org</small></p></div>
<p style="text-align:left">One area outshines all others in provoking <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2018/02/07/talking-killer-whales-only-a-journalist-could-believe-it/">crazy talk about language in the media</a>, and that is the idea of <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36489">language acquisition in nonhuman species</a>.</p>
<p>On June 19 came the sad news of the death of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)">Koko</a>,
the western lowland gorilla cared for by Francine “Penny” Patterson at a
sanctuary in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Many obituaries appeared, and
the press indulged as never before in sentimental nonsense about talking
with the animals. Credulous repetition of Koko’s mythical prowess in
sign language was everywhere.</p>
<p><a href="http://time.com/5318710/koko-gorilla-life/">Jeffrey Kluger’s essay in <em>Time</em></a> was unusually extreme in its blend of emotion, illogicality, wishful thinking, and outright falsehood.</p>
<p>Koko, he tells us, once made a sequence of hand signs that Patterson interpreted as “<strong>you key there me cookie</strong>“;
and Kluger calls it “impressive … for the clarity of its meaning.”
Would you call it clear and meaningful if it were uttered by an adult
human?</p>
<p>As always with the most salient cases of purported ape signing, Koko
was flailing around producing signs at random in a purely
situation-bound bid to obtain food from her trainer, who was in control
of a locked treat cabinet. The fragmentary and anecdotal evidence about
Koko’s much-prompted and much-rewarded sign usage was never sufficient
to show that the gorilla even understood the meanings of individual
signs — that <em>key</em> denotes a device intended to open locks, that the word <em>cookie</em> is not appropriately applied to muffins, and so on.</p>
<p>Above all, Koko never uttered <strong>sentences</strong>. Patterson saw the <em>you key there me cookie</em>
sign sequence as intended to convey “Please use your key to open that
cabinet and get out a cookie for me to eat”; but she would have been
just as ready to accept “<strong>there cookie you me key</strong>” or “<strong>cookie there me key you</strong>” or any other random display of context-associated signs.</p>
<p>In English, none of the 120 orders in which we could arrange the words <em>cookie</em>, <em>key</em>, <em>me</em>, <em>there</em>, and <em>you</em>
makes a grammatical sentence. (For one thing, we need a verb.) For
Patterson, or for Kluger, any order Koko might have chosen provides
evidence of linguistic command.</p>
<p>Much has been made of the story of Koko’s first pet kitten, which
strayed onto a road and was killed by a passing car. Kluger reports that
when told of the accident, Koko “expressed her grief in more or less
the same way we would.”</p>
<p>Koko is said to have produced a sign sequence including “<strong>cat cry have sorry Koko love</strong>.”
That’s not how I would express my feelings about my dead pet. (Your
mileage may differ.) But doubtless any of the 720 possible orders of
those six signs would have sufficed for Patterson (or Kluger) to
interpret them as a eulogy.</p>
<p>If Koko had verifiably responded to the death report with an actual
sign-language sentence meaning “Did the driver stop?” I might not be so
dubious. But “<strong>cat cry have sorry Koko love</strong>” doesn’t appear to reflect even the vaguest understanding of what had happened.</p>
<p>You’ve seen expert users of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting
at theaters or on TV. Just watch video of a sign interpreter for a
minute, and then view some of the available footage of Koko’s alleged
signing. There is no resemblance at all.</p>
<p>But then Patterson does not claim that Koko learned ASL (though many
newspapers wrongly assert that). She claims it was a different language,
“Gorilla Sign Language.” The distinction is useful in rebutting any
human signer who might claim to see no ASL in Koko’s gestural behavior.</p>
<p>Plenty of linguists have expertise in the analysis of sign languages,
and none of them have ever independently confirmed Koko’s incipient
linguistic competence. Koko never <strong>said</strong> anything: never
made a definite truth claim, or expressed a specific opinion, or asked a
clearly identifiable question. Producing occasional context-related
signs, almost always in response to Patterson’s cues, after years of
intensive reward-based training, is not language use. Not even if it
involves gestures that a genuine signer could employ in language use.</p>
<p>Neither journalists nor laypeople will ever be convinced of that.
Such is their yearning to believe that Koko had mastered language, and
had things to say, and shared those things with Penny Patterson. They
want to believe these things, and they will not be denied.</p>
<p>Moreover, they will accuse me (probably in the comments below) of
being an arrogant, hyperskeptical, human-biased speciesist, contemptuous
of ape abilities. But I would love to learn about the experiences and
opinions of nonhuman primates through direct conversation with them.
Unfortunately, all that was established by Penny Patterson’s years of
devotion to training Koko was that we are not going to have that
opportunity</p><p><br></p><p>Forwarded from the Chronicle of Higher Education<br></p></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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