Lexical creation by signing apes

[Celso Álvarez Cáccamo]

At 16:44 2001-05-14 -0400, David Samuels wrote:

>Celso,
>
>You wrote:
>
>If the facts were like the researchers narrate them, Koko obviously
>generalized from sound to visual sign to designate another referent, which
>is quite an achievement. That's the principle of orthographic writing.
>
>I'm not sure about this, and not sure how you would determine it
>experimentally. If I'm not mistaken, Koko hears the lexeme /brauz/ a lot.
>So perhaps there is simply a relationship between spoken and gestural sign
>on the one hand, and between spoken sign and referent on the other. It
>could simply mean that Koko associates the sound /brauz/ with a certain
>signed gesture, the meaning of which is either the thing above your eyes,
>or a certain kind of food. How often is Koko made aware of the plural noun
>"brow + s" vs. the collective noun "browse" as a minimal pair? How often
>does Koko talk about her "brows" as oposed to asking for lettuce? As with
>many of these chimp and gorilla things, it may in fact be the
>*researcher's* knowledge of homophony that triggers the interpretation
>that the ape is being creative.

Well, that "simply" in "It could simply mean that Koko associates the sound
/brauz/ with a certain signed gesture" is the key. The researchers say they
once introduced browse in Koko's diet for the first time; they had never
signed "browse", and one of them claim that Koko kept signing "eyebrows"
over several days until she (the researcher) realized what Koko was doing.
I would say she invented a homonymous sign by partial homophony: The short
video scene shows Koko outside, facing the camera and signing it, not in
"dialog" with anyone about body parts.

I suppose Koko has also heard and seen the different signs for "I" and
"eye", or for other homophonous English words. Has she ever confused them?
I don't know.

The case about students (and Big Linguists ;-)) confusing "its" and "it's",
or "their" and "there" is quite different. Adult misspellers have been
exposed to both written forms for homophonous words, and therefore
'confusion' is the term. A better parallel is, rather, that of language
learners, children who must spell for the first time "their" when they've
only learned "there".

I've just done this home experiment with my wife, a native speaker of
English: I told her there's this new tiny flower found in Switzerland
called ['tIk at l], how would you write that? Of course she wrote "tickle".
Then I said a new mineral discovered in Mars has been named ['haUnd], and
she wrote "hound".

I may overextend this, but if Koko did what she did as they report she did,
then she went further than English speakers, who after all rely on
orthographic rules to represent phonemic combinations. Koko associated the
indexical sign for 'eyebrows' with a totally new referent -- from
ideographic to a type of "syllabic" signing.

Please understand I'm not trying to make a particular point about apes'
superhuman language abilities, but to understand this type of lexical
creation. Does it exist among hearing users of signed languages (e.g.
hearing children of deaf parents)?


Celso Álvarez Cáccamo              Tel. +34 981 167000 ext. 1888
Linguística Geral, Faculdade de Filologia     FAX +34 981 167151
Universidade da Corunha                          lxalvarz at udc.es
15071 A Corunha, Galiza (Espanha)  http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/