Herbert Terrace, the primary author and a researcher at Columbia University, had taken on the task of proving the linguist Noam Chomsky wrong. The Gardners used signs only, Patterson signed and spoke, and others used lexigrams (tiles with abstract designs that symbolised words).ĭespite the vocabulary these primates memorised, a paper published in the journal Science in 1979 questioned their achievements. Perhaps some training methods were better than others. Shreejata Gupta, a comparative psychologist at the University of York, the UK, who studies animal communication, says success in mastering sign language may depend on the personality of the individual and cognitive capacity at the species level. Other primates in similar language-learning programs, such as the chimpanzees Sarah at a psychology lab in Pennsylvania and Lana at Emory University, and the orangutan Chantek at the University of Tennessee, were also attempting to break the wall separating our species. She appeared in documentaries, television shows, and popular articles and became a brand with merchandise bearing her artwork and portrait. She declared “language is no longer the exclusive domain of man.” Stories of Koko’s exceptional communicating skills began circulating, and her rising popularity was rivalled perhaps by only one other gorilla, the fictional King Kong. Within three years, the gorilla had mastered close to 200 words, a feat that earned Patterson a PhD from Stanford University. A breakthrough! But did Washoe know swans were waterbirds? Or was she pointing to two different things – water and bird? Other primatologists felt these researchers saw what they wanted to hear.Īt this promising time came a student of psychology, Francine “Penny” Patterson, and the one-year-old prodigy Koko. When one of the researchers pointed to a swan and signed “What’s that?”, Washoe apparently signed back “water” “bird”, combining two distinct words she knew to create a new one to describe the bird. The enterprise of educating primates received a boost in the 1960s when Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada taught 350 signs of the American sign language to a chimp called Washoe. They stopped the experiment and exiled Gua to a primate centre, where she died in less than a year. Instead, they appeared not to have foreseen the opposite from happening – their son grunted like a chimp and bit others. If the Kelloggs hoped Gua would learn words from Donald, they were disappointed. He and his wife raised a young chimp called Gua with their toddler Donald. But that fact was unknown in the 1930s, and an undeterred psychologist Winthrop Kellogg tried another method. Researchers attempted to teach a chimpanzee called Viki to speak English and, not surprisingly, failed since non-humans don’t have the vocal anatomy for speech. The field of inter-species communication is littered with failed, tragic experiments. Even as the media went gaga over her ability to sign responses, many primatologists were far less ecstatic. However, the verdict on Koko’s ability to communicate is not unequivocal. It is no surprise that news of her own death on 19 June 2018, two weeks shy of her birthday, flashed around the world and led to an outpouring of grief. Many of them were proud to count her as a ‘friend’.Īsked where dead gorillas went, she apparently signed, “Comfortable hole bye.” Despite the nonchalance of her outlook on death, she “became very sombre with her head bowed and her lip quivering” on hearing of Robin Williams’ demise more than a decade after they met. On hearing of the cat’s death in an accident, Koko signed “cry” “bad” “frown” “sad”.Ĭelebrities such as Robin Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, William Shatner and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’s bassist Flea, among others, flocked to her trailer. She wriggled her 127-kilogram frame into our hearts by assuming human affectations, such as cradling her pet, a tailless Manx kitten she named All Ball, like an infant in her massive arms. The controlled breathing required to modulate sound was a feat thought to be impossible for non-human apes. She could sort-of play wind instruments and fake a cough or sneeze on command. Koko’s ungrammatical chattiness was an astounding accomplishment on its own, but she went on to bust other beliefs. As an adult, her vocabulary was 1,000-word strong, and she understood 2,000 English words. She captured our imagination when she broke the human-animal barrier by communicating with a version of sign language. She was named Hanabi-Ko, Japanese for ‘Fireworks Child’, but she’d become a celebrity known as Koko. On this day, 47 years ago, when the Fourth of July fireworks exploded around the United States, a western lowland gorilla was born in San Francisco Zoo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |