Koko the
gorilla does
not speak
American Sign Language, nor
any form of
language at all.
Francine Patterson, Koko's trainer, is a poor, delusional woman who can't face the fact that she's more or less wasted the past 25+ years of her life on a project which could not have succeeded. Although the
media hyped up most sheep-minded Americans into thinking that Koko communicated in a way similar, if not identical, to the way that
humans communicate
instinctively, several respected experts in the field of
linguistics published articles in scientific journals circa 1980 demonstrating that Patterson and Koko's claims were a total
sham.
For more information, consult the following articles:
Terrace, Herbert S: "Why Koko Can't Talk: The Ape's Still Fooling Most of the People, Most of the Time"
Sciences; 1982, 22, 9, Dec, 8-10..
Columbia U, New York 10027
Petitto, Laura A. and Mark S Seidenberg: "On the Evidence for Linguistic Abilities in Signing Apes."
Brain-and-Language; 1979, 8, 2, Sept, 162-183..
U Illinois Champaign 61820
Or alternately, take an introductory course in linguistics at your local college, or read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. Then read through the following articles by Patterson, and notice how her definition of language acquisition constrasts completely with the accepted ones.
Patterson, Francine G:
"The Gestures of a Gorilla: Language Acquisition in Another Pongid."
Brain-and-Language; 1978, 5, 1, Jan, 72-97..
Stanford U, CA 94305
Patterson, Francine and Joanne Tanner, Nancy Mayer:
"Pragmatic Analysis of Gorilla Utterances: Early Communicative Development in the Gorilla Koko"
Journal-of-Pragmatics; 1988, 12, 1, Feb, 35-54..
Patterson, Francine G.P. and Ronald H Cohn:
"Language Acquisition by a Lowland Gorilla: Koko's First Ten Years of Vocabulary Development."
Word; 1990, 41, 2, Aug, 97-143..
Finally, just for shits and giggles, read the transcipt of Koko "chatting" over AOL on Earth Day 1998:
http://www.koko.org/news/aol.html