Can Koko the gorilla actually talk?

Great Debates
21

The OP makes 2 references to “language”:

As Dr. Beard notes in his article, we must indeed distinguish between language and communication.

Obviously, all animals communicate (even corals, which are hardly recognizable as animals). It can even be argued that plants communicate. And it’s generally accepted that higher animals learn.

But using language is a different kettle of fish. What distinguishes language from systems of communication such as calls and pheremones, for example, is the use of arbitrary symbols with socially negotiated values in conjunction with an underlying syntax to produce completely novel utterances which can be accurately decoded. The power and utility of language is significantly superior to non-linguistic systems of communication.

I do believe there is a “language/no language dichotomy”. However, we don’t need to accept a clearly defined dichotomy for the distinction to be meaningful. It is impossible, for example, to determine an exact altitude where our atmosphere stops and outer space starts, or to define precisely when dialects develop into separate languages – but this does not imply that there is no meaningful difference between atmosphere and space or between dialect and language.

Communicating with one’s fingers isn’t necessarily language. ASL, however, is language. Koko does not know or use ASL. She has learned to use gestures in a way that gets her what she wants, and perhaps to communicate. But she doesn’t use sign language. She doesn’t have linguistic ability.

22

That was absolutely the first thing that jumped into my mind. You could have facilitated MY communication. It took me about thirty seconds of reading that “conversation” to determine the entire thing is kind of absurd:

HaloMyBaby: SickboyRE asks: Koko, have you taught other gorillas sign language, on your own?
DrPPatrsn: Good question.
LiveKOKO: myself
DrPPatrsn: part of that answer might be that she’s taught us

So someone asks a question, the gorilla says “Me!” and the researcher concluded the gorilla was reversing the question in an abstract way to form the answer that she was teaching us.

Give me a break.

I suspect there is absolutely nothing the gorilla could have done that Dr. Paterson would not have creatively interpreted to be an intelligent response.

23

Embarrassing, yes, but also funny as hell. The best part:

24

Well - perhaps.

Or, perhaps, the conversation was like this:

And the researchers reported it as:

If you see what I mean.

People are very good at extrapolating communication. We do it all the time with other people, because we assume the other people are the same as we are mentally. We can’t make that assumption with other species.

There is communication going on, on some level, but not anything that leads to genuine insight into the mind of other primates. Except that other primates are different. IMO.

Regards,
Shodan

25

I come in here with my first-year Linguistics course in hand and Sample_the_Dog writes a brilliant, eloquent, outstanding post to the OP, saying exactly what I wanted to say. Not fair, I tell you. :wink:

26

When I was at Columbia, I took a course under a professor named Herbert Terrace, who had done extensive research on his own in the field of teaching sign language to chimpanzees. The best known of these chimps was named (I warn you in advance, this is a real groaner!) Nim Chimpsky.

Initially, Terrace (a friend and former student of B.F. Skinner) believed strongly that learning language was a behavioral matter, and that his research would make a monkey of Noam Chomsky, who held that humans are uniquely hard-wired for language, in a way that no other animal on Earth is.

Nim was a very bright chimp who learned to use a wide variety of signs… but ultimately, Terrace concluded, Nim was NOT really learning “language” in any meaningful sense. Basically, Nim learned dozens of different combinations of signs that said, “gimme a piece of fruit.”

And, Terrace, believed, that was essebitally what apes like Washoe and Koko have done- they’ve learned a host of ways of saying “Feed me!” THe few times I’ve seen Koko on television, her “speech” invariably came down to “I want a raisin- you got a raisin for me?”

And IF that’s all that’s involved, well, I have little doubt that a pigeon could learn to peck out a complex combination of keys if it knew that some combinations would lead to it getting rewarded with food. That WOULD show that pigeons are smart, but it wouldn’t

There’s no doubt that apes are very intelligent, and that, like most mammals, they have ways of communicating basic thoughts and feelings. But I’m not convinced they can learn to express those thoughts or feelings in ways that are equivalent to human language.

27

I think Koko can certainly communicate but I’ve yet to see evidence of real language.

I’ve spent many many hours training my pet schnauzer and he can do things that are pretty damn impressive for an animal.

He may not be able to ask for food, but he will come to me and whine when he wants something. That’s not much different from how a very young human communicates with it’s parents.

Now, the dog obviously can’t tell me what he wants clearly, so I ask him using a list of things he seems to recognize, (Want outside? You want some food?) and he will respond with yappy barking when I hit the right one. I know if I’ve chosen wrong because if I think he wants food and he doesn’t he’ll more or less ignore the food.

So there’s a level of communication between me and the dog, and I think dogs are a lot smarter than some people give them credit for, but there’s no language communication.

I don’t see how anything that Koko does is much different from that.

28

I must have been channelling you, my dear. :wink:

I’m actually very encouraged by this thread. I’d anticipated a strong showing by the pro-monkey-language contingency. The Koko “researchers” may not be good scientists, but they’re great marketers, and in my experience most folks who’ve heard of this at all believe that they have in fact taught an ape to use sign language.

There’s hope, Cecil, there’s hope!!

PS: Part of my earlier post got omitted. I meant to say “and perhaps to communicate some rather more abstract concepts”.

29

I’ve seen two decent posts in here, and they involve the fact that the definition of what is language is important. I have seen Koko on tv and the pointing to images when talking was very impressive, she did communicate some pretty complicated concepts. On the other hand she wasn’t capable of using very complicated language. The above transcripts of 6 years ago aren’t representative, and misleading too - conversing with people over the internet requires another layer of abstraction altogether. The language interaction in her natural environment was far, far more involved and complicated, and you could see emotional backup of the ideas the tried to convey.

That’s not to say I accept this all blindly. My biggest qualm against research like this is that as with many language related research, the field would do well to borrow some more habits from the exact sciences. I had a seriously hard time keeping my sanity when I studied English literature, which was a lot worse (cue basic and far-fetched Freudian speculation of biographical events in the lives of poets as a basis for interpretation of literary works, rather than, say applying cognitive psychology backed up with some healthy statistics and methodological cross-checking).

Things that impress me are a monkey’s capability of analysing, say, a maze and navigating out of one first try, faster than a human can. Or the capacity to see a banana outside of a cage out of reach, sitting in the cage contemplating the situation, seeing a stick, and after a while picking it up and using it to get the banana. It is clear that monkeys have a good capacity for abstract thought and are self-aware (as discussed in the animal thread). And I believe that koko convincingly shows that she can apply this to abstract language in a relatively advanced way. It may be easy to have this obscured by how advanced humans are at using langauge. But it’s there nonetheless.

30

Since i am slightly fluent with ASL- no, you’re not missing anything, you’re right. Unless it is spelled out “sounds like” or “rimes with” are pretty well meaningless in ASL.

It is clear that Koko does know a few signs and does use them properly. It seems very doubtful that she is useing them in sentances, or in context with other words.
If Koko was- then any good ASL interpreter should be able to get meaning out of Kokos signing- instead of just “DrPPatrsn”. But I was watching Koko on TV with such a ASL interpreter- and she couldn’t make sense out of most of what Kopo was 'saying" and she thought the good Doctor was “bullshitting us”. (And the sign for BS is: your right arm crossed over your left on your chest, your right arm is slightly elevated. Your right hand makes the “devil” -fore and little finger out- and your left hand opens & closes below it.)

31

As a small clarification, what I saw wasn’t the use of ASL, but the use of a picture book. Maybe it was a different monkey from Koko.

32

Ape. A different ape than Koko.

Sorry for the nitpick. Pedantic, I know.

33

Well, Koko isn’t deaf, after all – perhaps her trainers are in the habit of talking to her in English while they sign, and they think she’s learned how to associate certain signs with the corresponding English words? (I have no particular stake in this argument, but this sounds like a reasonable possibility.)