#gorilla #koko #kpassionate
Can great apes like gorillas and chimpanzees learn to communicate using sign language? A biologist explores the history of ape sign language.
00:00 - Ape Sign Language
00:36 - Nim Chimpsky
01:48 - Koko the Gorilla
02:11 - Koko the Gorilla's Climate Change Message
03:04 - Koko the Gorilla Interview
05:16 - Was Koko the Gorilla Fake?
07:00 - Can Apes Use Sign Language?
In the 1960s, researchers began attempts to teach great apes to use individual signs derived from American Sign Language. One of the original test subjects was a chimpanzee named Neam Chimpsky. A dunk on Noam Choamsky, a linguist and prominent critic of this field of study. Chimpksy was part of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University led by Herbert S. Terrace.
Terrace is an interesting figure in this story. Initially, he rose to academic fame and stardom for his apparent success with Neam. But to his credit, Terrace is a true scientist and actual skeptic. After he carefully reviewed the video evidence… he noticed that the researchers were prompting the apes and that the apes were essentially mimicking the human’s behavior. Or, as the scientific journal Big Think put it, “The Apes were Aping it.”
Terrace concluded that the only reason the apes would sign was to obtain a reward. It really didn’t matter what that reward was or what words were signed. The reward could be food, like a banana, or it could be to go outside. Ultimately, Terrace concluded that “Nim was unable to use words conversationally, let alone form sentences.”
Hear what one of Nim's researchers, Robert Sapolsky, had to say about Nim, Koko, and other "talking" apes → https://youtu.be/SIOQgY1tqrU?si=MvwH9LuCze1az7sg&t=4720
Which leads me to Koko the Gorilla. Koko was born in San Francisco Zoo, and lived most of her life at The Gorilla Foundation's preserve. Her instructor and caregiver reported that Koko had an active vocabulary of more than 1,000 words and understood more than 2,000 spoken words.
There is even a video of Koko delivering a message about climate change. Putting the message of this video aside, do we really think Koko understood man-made climate change? I’m extremely skeptical. Combine that with the fact that this video is heavily edited and pieced together from who knows how many hours of footage and takes.
Critical evaluations of the video evidence suggest that Koko was simply responding to cues from her trainers to display specific signs. These cues can be conscious or even unconscious in what is commonly called the Clever Hans effect.
Criticism from the scientific community also noted that, while Koko often appeared in the popular press, there were very few scientific publications with substantial data. Another concern was that the meaning of Koko’s signs were always restructured or reinterpreted by her handler.
Ultimately, the study of ape sign language is dormant. There hasn’t been a paper published on the topic in over ten years. There is only one signing ape still alive and he hasn’t been trained in decades. If Koko truly learned how to speak sign language… then why have researchers given up on this study? A linguist at the University of California at Santa Cruz put it this way, "It would be wonderful if animals could say things about the world. But they just don’t.”
Cited Sources
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44559261
[2] https://bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/
[3] https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-language-research-criticism-of-working-conditions-and-animal-care.html
[4] https://fi.edu/en/blog/when-koko-gorilla-chatted-online
[5] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2018/06/25/we-wanted-to-believe-in-koko-and-so-we-did/
[6] https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/12/10/459181304/famous-gorilla-s-climate-speech
[7] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/speaking-bonobo-134931541/
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