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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-talk-to-us-you-d@mn-dirty-ape dept.

Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech.

In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko has spent more than 40 years living immersed with humans -- interacting for many hours each day with psychologist Penny Patterson and biologist Ron Cohn.

"I went there with the idea of studying Koko's gestures, but as I got into watching videos of her, I saw her performing all these amazing vocal behaviors," says Perlman, now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology Professor Gary Lupyan.

The vocal and breathing behaviors Koko had developed were not necessarily supposed to be possible.

The role of language in intelligence and the evolution of consciousness is fascinating. It's profound that apes can begin to learn it within the right social context. Still, humans do it quite innately.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by RedBear on Sunday August 16 2015, @12:34PM

    by RedBear (1734) on Sunday August 16 2015, @12:34PM (#223509)

    I remember watching a documentary about Koko many years ago now, where the handlers described how she had somehow taken to pointing to her eyebrow to ask for food. Her food was referred to by the handlers as "browse", and she routinely used "I" to refer to herself. Somehow she had made the phonetic leap between using other sign language gestures to say "I, browse" to ask for food and simply started pointing to her "eyebrows" as a shortcut. A shortcut not for the gestures or meaning but for the sound of the words.

    You could have knocked me over with a feather.

    That was just a single example of the amazing level of communication Koko has been capable of for decades. However you interpret that, whether it means we are not nearly as smart as we think we are or animals are not really as dumb as we like to believe, I've never looked at any primate or many other animals in quite the same way since. The impression that I have today is that we think animals are stupid mainly because we don't understand their thought processes and ways of communicating. But we're slowly discovering that many animal species seem to be a hell of a lot smarter in many different ways than they've ever been given credit for.

    Someday we will absolutely find some way to create animals capable of human-like speech. And it's going to be weird, and disturbing, and tragic, and fraught with ethical peril... but also potentially one of the most wonderful and wondrous things to happen in the history of the world. Even if we never find sentient non-terrestrial aliens, we will most certainly eventually create some sentient companion species simply because we are so uncomfortable living in the universe alone. Of this I have little doubt.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @01:08PM (#223512)

    What about kitty kats?