In the beginning was the word.

Actually Koko could talk; you just have some hidden ableism – A Response to Soup Emporium’s “Why Koko couldn’t talk (sorry)|The Deep Dive”

A thorough deconstruction of the conventional wisdom of why what Koko et al. demonstrated cannot strictly be speaking be considered "language".

The author does not appear to be trained as a linguist exactly, and plainly has no love for the narrow definition of what constitutes true language. But I think they more than make up for this with their actual specialty: working with people with limited or rudimentary language skills.

Three things I really appreciate about this piece:

• the non-negotiable hard, bright line between people and animals
  
• the purposive understanding of language, speech, communication and cognition
  
• the dedication to considering the problem from multiple perspectives, in accordance with the three needful things.

Overall I believe that from a theoretical linguistic perspective this piece is clearly flawed, but in terms of actionable takeaway point it may be less misleading than the temptations the "correct" analysis may open up for some people.

One of the most important clips you include starts at 19:26. It’s one of the few uncut clips provided, and you completely missed the significance of it. When interacting with Mister Rogers (RIP), Koko displays a level of communication that is actually quite advanced and impressive, especially considering that she’s a gorilla.

Mister Rogers had asks “how do you say love?” and from there, you hyper-focus on the fact that she didn’t answer the question without Penny’s prompt.

But watch that clip again and look at Koko. She’s not looking at Penny or even Mister Rogers. She’s touching and looking at his cufflink. From these behaviors, it’s safe to assume that her attention is on the cufflink, not on Mister Rogers’ question of “how do you say ‘love?’”

Following his question, Koko says at 19:37 “what’s that? Flower,” and points to his sun-shaped cufflink. That is, she uses the vocabulary she has to demonstrate a very high level of mand: Requesting information. This is a skill you don’t see until around age 2 in humans. Before that, mands are usually for concrete things: mama/dada (caregiver/attention), eat/baba/crackers (food/drink), etc. Following these stages of concrete requests is the infamous “why?” phase that anyone who has spent extended periods of time with young children knows well.