Can gorillas use human language?

Did you know that gorillas can learn human language? In 1970s, a psychologist named Penny adopted a gorilla as young as 1 and named it Coco. Because the vocal cords of gorillas are different from those of humans and their pronunciation is limited by physiology, Penny decided to adopt the gesture language of deaf-mute dialogue.

Gorillas are shy and docile animals. Only in a few cases will it become violent, such as fighting for a spouse and protecting young children. Strong gorillas are actually much gentler than chimpanzees.

The way of education is just like educating human children, but it needs more patience. After hard work, Coco the gorilla finally learned simple sign language such as "drink water" and "eat more". With this good start, Coco's learning progress began to accelerate, and she could master about 65,438+000 new words every year. By the age of seven, she could use 645 sign language words.

Coco is sometimes stubborn, naughty, swearing and lying. When it is angry with you, it will scold "smelly", "fool", "dirty ghost in the toilet" and so on. With the increase of vocabulary, Coco can not only talk with people in sign language, but also understand and respond to hundreds of words spoken by people. For example, Coco plays with a doll and puts it close to his ear. He will say, "This is an ear." Penny gave it a glass of milk, and Coco said happily, "Coco likes it."

Once, Coco chewed a red crayon and was scolded by Penny, but Coco immediately explained in sign language: "Lips." Then pretend to paint my lips with crayons, which means that I didn't chew at all, but used it to paint lipstick and make myself up.

In addition to the gorilla cocoa, scientists have also conducted similar training for chimpanzees and achieved good results. All this shows that some members of the animal world can use human language like us as long as appropriate educational methods are adopted.