Koko (Lowland Gorilla)

Koko is a 180-pound, lowland gorilla who has been taught American Sign Language by developmental psychologist Francine “Penny” Patterson since July, 1972. Born on the fourth of July, 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo, the gorilla was named Hanabi-ko (Japanese for “fireworks child”), but she is best known by her nickname,Koko. With the possible exception of King Kong, Koko is perhaps the world's most famous Great Ape. She has appeared hundreds of times on national television and the covers of magazines such as National Geographic. As Koko is purported to have a vocabulary of more than a thousand signs, anthropologists and linguists have been intrigued by her apparent capacity for complex, human-like language. Children and her other fans, however, are simply fascinated by her charm: Koko loves to look at pictures in books and magazines; she paints, and she has raised several kittens.

While not every researcher agrees with Penny Patterson that “she's just as much a person as we are,” Koko is an ambassador and “spokesperson” for wildlife conservation, endangered species, and refuge projects for primates. Koko's Gorilla Foundation—with its website, newsletters, and other promotions—have kept ape-language research in the public consciousness, even though it has lost much of its earlier momentum in the scholarly community. While Koko's website says she wants to have a baby and that she will teach her child to talk, her past romantic encounters (such as with her first boyfriend, of sorts, Michael) have not been encouraging. As Koko progresses through her mid-30s (which is long-lived for gorillas in the wild), the possibility of pregnancy is decreasing yearly.

In the 1970s, interest in communicating with primates using sign language, computers, or other artificial devices not only captured the public's imagination to be able to “talk to the animals,” but also seemed to be a very promising line of scholarly research. Psychologists, biological anthropologists, and those who studied language acquisition believed that these ape sign-language experiments could offer much insight into human evolutionary cognitive and linguistic development. Of all the apes studied, Koko appeared to be the most facile, and even some introductory anthropology textbooks were saying that she knew some 2,000 English words. If this were true, it would put Koko on par linguistically with a 5- or 6-year-old human child.

Patterson now gives a more modest figure for Koko's accomplishments: a working vocabulary of 500 signs with approximately another 500 signs she has said herself on one or more occasions. Yet, more important than the mere number of different vocabulary items attributed to Koko are the quality and kinds of language she uses. For example, one of the characteristics that is often said to separate human from nonhuman language is productivity: the ability to coin new words for new phenomena. Koko apparently does this quite often, such as making the sign combination eye hat for “mask,” elephant baby for a Pinocchio doll, or white tiger for a toy zebra. While other primates have used signs productively (such as the chimpanzee Washoe's famous water bird for[Page 1380]“duck”) Koko's neologisms seem more abstract, as the component parts of her new signs are not actually physically present when she creates them. She also has a very colorful and creative vernacular vocabulary of expletives. When Penny playfully put a salt shaker on her head, Koko called her head stupid. When asked what she thinks of her gorilla friend Michael, she has replied, depending on her mood, think stupid devil, rotten devil, or toilet.

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