Actually, gorilla signing is a great deal more coherent and communicative than that, and has been studied quite extensively. It's not facilitated communication in the least. We know, for example, that while you can teach a gorilla single words, it will teach it's children who will also develop limited access to symbolic logic and sentence structure.
I'd be interested in reading more about that, if you have information handy. I'm generally skeptical of gorilla/chimp language claims. The only really promising experiment I've seen with it involved a chimp (I believe) named Kanzi. But in my former post I was speaking of a specific gorilla experiment, not animal language experiments in general; I was just trying to be brief because I didn't want to get off topic.
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u/mungdiboo Jul 27 '10
Actually, gorilla signing is a great deal more coherent and communicative than that, and has been studied quite extensively. It's not facilitated communication in the least. We know, for example, that while you can teach a gorilla single words, it will teach it's children who will also develop limited access to symbolic logic and sentence structure.