Developmental Psychology: Francine Penny Patterson

Francine Penny Patterson was born in Chicago, Illinois in February 13, 1947. She is the second oldest of seven children, her parents were C.H. Patterson and Frances Spano Patterson. Since she was little she felt attracted for animals and nature. In 1970 she got her bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, two years later, she earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Stanford University. Since then she started her long journey along with the Gorilla named Koko which is a western female lowland gorilla born as “Hanabi-Ko” a Japanese word that means the fireworks child. She was born at the San Francisco, zoo, in July 4, 1971, but she was really sick and in danger to die, but a fortunately
She proposed that a gorilla could learn to speak with humans using sign language. So, when Patterson asked to the zoo master if she can work with Koko, he didn’t like at all the proposal, but then he realize that anyways Koko will be isolated from their own kind for several months in the zoo nursery, so finally he agreed that her and Koko spend several hours together. Finally, Penny started to work with Koko, her main objective was teach Koko American Sign Language (ASL) in order to prove her thesis, so with the help of Ameslan who was an standard American Sign Language, and Karl Pribram, theorist of neuropsychology they started with the
Then she realize that Koko couldn’t make some signs because the size of her hands and body, so she started to modified some signs of the regular ASL, and from there the Gorilla Sign language (GSL) was emerged. Although it wasn’t an easy task she kept trying to get Koko to focus on her hands, Koko was like a little child active, playful and he wasn’t able to maintain her attention for long periods of time. But she did remained calm and willing to teach her patiently. The three basic words that she wanted to Koko start learning were: eat, drink, and more. Patterson and her team thought that for Koko will be a little complicated to learn sign language fast, but to their surprise Koko had begun to sign in about two