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Documentary gorilla image11/1/2023 Though it’s not a part of this film, Patterson sent out a press release upon the 2014 death of the actor Robin Williams. Could others fluent in American Sign Language have carried on the same level of conversation that Patterson claimed? One frequent visitor, an animal language expert named Eugene Linden, is quoted on camera explaining how Koko had greeted him for the first time with a complex message, but we don’t learn whether Linden witnessed and understood the communication himself or relied on an interpretation of Koko’s doting “mother.” It’s curious to note that there are few if any scenes in the film of handlers other than Patterson “speaking” with Koko. Instead, researchers focused on watching the animals communicate with one another. Terrace’s paper convinced most of the scientific community, and by the 1980s, there was little enthusiasm to pursue sign-language communications involving primates. He insisted that Nim, Koko, and others on the same experimental wavelength, were merely responding by prompts for praise or treats. His conclusion, based on a 1979 paper, was that Project Nim – and, by extension, all efforts to communicate with primates via sign language – was a failure. Herb Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist who’d undertaken a long-term project of his own to teach sign language to Nim, a chimpanzee. The gorilla’s level of communications ability was questioned by other researchers, however. For instance, when Koko’s pet kitten was run over by a car, the gorilla was said to have strung together the message, “comfortable hole goodbye.” (It’s not explained how Koko knew that burial was a traditional endgame, though perhaps her human family buried the kitten in her presence.) Patterson also insists that Koko can combine gestures to express simple thoughts. Today, at the age of 44, it’s said that Koko knows some 1,000 sign language gestures and recognizes 2,000 spoken English words. She learned at about the rate of one sign a month for her first year-and-a-half with Patterson, or about 80 signs by the time she was two. As a result, Patterson took control of Koko and eventually adopted her.Īs the film shows through vintage footage, usually shot by Cohn, Koko’s ability to grasp sign language was remarkable. Soon after she started working with Koko, the young gorilla had to be separated from her mother for the treatment of a life-threatening disease and the troop rejected her when she was returned. She was a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Stanford University who wanted to discover the viability of human-gorilla communications through American Sign Language. Patterson first met Koko at the San Francisco Zoo soon after the female gorilla’s birth, in 1971. The film was produced for a PBS release in 2016 and is currently available on Netflix. The story of this odd, but dedicated little family is told in the BBC documentary, Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks. Koko was, and is the (child?) of psychologist Francine “Penny” Patterson and her friend and Koko photographer/videographer of four decades, Ron Cohn. The very idea of a talking gorilla charmed the world in the 1970s, when Koko, the young Western lowland gorilla was introduced on the cover and in the pages of National Geographic.
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