alt Hacker NewsTo dismiss it as total fraud is disingenuous, but I do agree that the personification of some of those videos is quite egregious. I don't think anyone expected a chimp to make coherent, grammatically correct sentences. But the relationship between sign/vocalization and emotion/desire is strong and seen in many animals, such as parrots. It depends on your definition of communication I suppose.
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conception • yesterday at 4:29 PM
There’s no evidence that KoKo ever communicated a word and had understanding of what the word meant outside of basic Pavlovian associations.
moi2388 • yesterday at 4:22 PM
Is it?
Afaik they didn’t actually sign anything other than random words, an “food” every second word or so..
The main issue wasn't grammatical correctness, it was being grammatical at all. It's not surprising that an animal can learn individual pieces of vocabulary: anybody whose dog loses its mind when the word "walk" is mentioned, or watched meerkats for significant periods of time can observe vocabulary in animals.
Koko was intended to be taught grammar, specifically the ability to express new thoughts by combining her vocabulary in an ordered way. Despite Francine Patterson's best efforts to convince the world otherwise, Koko never achieved this.