SASL Newsletter - Fall 2018 Issue Issue 11 - Fall 2018 | Page 11

By Geoffrey K. Pullum
One area outshines all others in provoking crazy talk about language in the media, and that is
the idea of language acquisition in nonhuman species.
On June 19 came the sad news of the death of Koko, the western lowland gorilla cared for by
Francine “Penny” Patterson at a sanctuary in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Many obituaries appeared,
and the press indulged as never before in sentimental nonsense about talking with the animals.
Credulous repetition of Koko’s mythical prowess in sign language was everywhere.
Jeffrey Kluger’s essay in Time was unusually extreme in its blend of emotion, illogicality, wishful
thinking, and outright falsehood.
Koko, he tells us, once made a sequence of hand signs that Patterson interpreted as “you key
there me cookie”; and Kluger calls it “impressive…for the clarity of its meaning.” Would you call it
clear and meaningful if it were uttered by an adult human?
As always with the most salient cases of purported ape signing, Koko was flailing around
producing signs at random in a purely situation-bound bid to obtain food from her trainer, who was in
control of a locked treat cabinet. The fragmentary and anecdotal evidence about Koko’s much-
prompted and much-rewarded sign usage was never sufficient to show that the gorilla even
understood the meanings of individual signs – that key denotes a device intended to open locks, that
the word cookie is not appropriately applied to muffins, and so on.
Above all, Koko never uttered sentences. Patterson saw the you key there me cookie sign
sequence as intended to convey “Please use your key to open that cabinet and get out a cookie for
me to eat”; but she would have been just as ready to accept “there cookie you me key” or “cookie
there me key you” or any other random display of context-associated signs.
In English, none of the 120 orders in which we could arrange the words cookie, key, me, there,
and you makes a grammatical sentence. (For one thing, we need a verb.) For Patterson, or for Kluger,
any order Koko might have chosen provides evidence of linguistic command.
Much has been made of the story of Koko’s first pet kitten, which strayed onto a road and was
killed by a passing car. Kluger reports that when told of the accident, Koko “expressed her grief in
more or less the same way we would.”
Koko is said to have produced a sign sequence including “cat cry have sorry Koko love.”
That’s not how I would express my feelings about my dead pet. (Your mileage may differ.) But
doubtless any of the 720 possible orders of those six signs would have sufficed for Patterson (or
Kluger) to interpret them as a eulogy.
If Koko had verifiably responded to the death report with an actual sign-language sentence
meaning “Did the driver stop?” I might not be so dubious. But cat cry have sorry Koko love doesn’t
appear to reflect even the vaguest understanding of what had happened.
You’ve seen expert users of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting at theaters or on TV.
Just watch video of a sign interpreter for a minute, and then view some of the available footage of
Koko’s alleged signing. There is no resemblance at all.
But then Patterson does not claim that Koko learned ASL (though many newspapers wrongly
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The Power of ASL
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Fall 2018 – Issue 11