Koko the gorilla that used sign language has died, she was 46 and died in her sleep.
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Almost all animals have complex communication systems; body language, scents, sounds that enable them to understand each other very well. should they bother learning ours? We could learn much from them. Now they say even plants communicate with each other....
NJSnarky
Level 6
June 24, 2018
0
It's called galvanic skin resistance and there is a gadget that measures it. A experiment conducted had a person walk into a room pick up a potted plant and drop it. "Killing" it, they hooked this gadget up to the plants in the room, and not only did they know when the "murderer" walked into the room they got scared. No joke, there is also a camera that will take a picture of your "aura", but that's a different story.
she taught us so much about an animal's abilities to learn
springlover
Level 7
June 23, 2018
2
Sad. I hate to see animals in captivity but hopefully we have learned from her
AmelieMatisse
Level 8
June 23, 2018
2
A little, but not much. 35-40 in wild, 50 or more in captivity. And while she was great for gorilla publicity, the idea that she "mastered" sign language is misleading at best. She knew a lot of symbols and was adept at communicating with them, but she, nor any animal has ever shown any ability to comprehend grammar, IE string words together to make sentences. Why humans quickly master this and nothing else does is still not understood.
Druvius
Level 8
June 23, 2018
3
Thank you for the information! I know ASL has different grammar rules than we have. I wonder if she was stringing words in that way?
@Lauren No animal, including Koko, has ever scored better than chance when tested for grammar comprehension. They literally cannot tell the difference between "man bites dog" and "dog bites man." It's obvious to even a 3 year old human, but animals can't grasp it. They can understand hundreds, even thousands of words, and use and understand them in groups within context, but stringing them together into sentences, no can do.
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