Lexical creation by signing apes

[David Samuels]

Damn, and I debated with myself for the longest time about whether I should
keep that "simply" in my message or remove it!

Here's what I think are some other keys:

1. Koko is not deaf

2. Koko is not exposed to fluent signers. Rather, she is exposed to English
speakers who can do some signing. (I could be confusing Penny Patterson
with other researchers. Does anyone know what the ASL fluency of the
Gorilla Foundation people is?)

So it's unclear to me how Koko is "inventing" a homonym, as that homonym
(brows/browse) already exists in the language she hears people speaking all
the time. That she wasn't shown a specific sign for "browse" the food means
that she was exposed only to the verbal homonym. So using the sign she
already knew went with the sound was an excellent guess, and clearly shows
the great intelligence and problem-solving capabilities of the great apes.

But researchers in non-human primate language capabilities are always
chalking things up to their subjects' creativity (just like
anthropologists, I guess). Koko "creates" her own syntax (something
Savage-Rumbaugh also says about Kanzi); Koko "jokes," says "up" sometimes
when she means "down"; Koko uses "metaphor," referring to "cat" as
"excrement." I don't know, maybe, maybe not. All we have is the
researcher's interpretations of what is or isn't going on here. It's not
clear that Koko has a metalanguage with which to discuss how she employs signs.

I'm more impressed with Washoe's creation of compound nouns for
"watermelon" (sugar + water) and "duck" (water + bird) than with Koko's use
of a sign meaning "brows" to mean "browse." Koko apparently creates
compounds, as well. (Of course, again, we have to take the researchers'
word for it that they are indeed compound nouns, since there's not much
evidence that Washoe or Koko use signs in a way that non-pongid speakers
would understand as "grammatical.")

I can see something in the brows/browse thing, but as an indicator of
"creativity"? I'd be much more impressed if Koko signed "stop brow-beating
me" to her keepers, or signed "Michael's paintings are so much more
low-brow than mine" to the gallery people.