- Francine Patterson
Dr. Francine "Penny" Patterson (b.
February 13 1947 , inChicago, Illinois ) is an American researcher who claims to have taught a modified form ofAmerican Sign Language which she calls "Gorilla Sign Language" or, GSL to agorilla named Koko.Francine is the second oldest of seven children and daughter of
C.H. Patterson , a professor of psychology and Frances Spano Patterson. She and her family moved toEdina, Minnesota when she was young, and then toUrbana, Illinois . Her mother died of cancer when Penny was a freshman in college, and the youngest of her siblings was just five years old. This triggered her interest indevelopmental psychology , a theme which pervaded much of her later work.Dr. Patterson earned her
bachelor's degree in psychology at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1970. She attained her Ph.D. in 1979 fromStanford University , with her dissertation "Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla" on teaching sign language to Koko and Michael, another Lowland Gorilla, who died in 2000.Currently Francine serves as the President and Research Director of
The Gorilla Foundation . The foundation was founded with her long time research colleague Dr.Ronald Cohn in 1978 using monetary support from aRolex Award. The Gorilla Foundation has been trying to move from its current home inWoodside, California toMaui, Hawaii 1.Dr. Patterson is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at
Santa Clara University and a member of the Board of Consultants at theCenter for Cross Cultural Communication inWashington, D.C. . She is the Editor-in-Chief of the "Gorilla" journal.Dr. Patterson is also an author of non-fiction works, including "The Education of Koko", "Koko's Kitten", "Koko-Love!: Conversations With a Signing Gorilla", and "Koko's Story". All of these books deal with her personal experiences with signing gorillas.
Patterson and her work with Koko are the subject of
Barbet Schroeder 's 1978 feature-length documentary "".External references
* [http://www.koko.org/foundation/ The Gorilla Foundation]
* [http://web.archive.org/web/20040622145527/http://www.las.uiuc.edu/alumni/spotlight/03fall_Patterson.html University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign article]
* [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=340 "Koko: A Talking Gorilla" at Criterion Collection] 1 [http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Mar/09/ln/ln06p.html Honolulu Advertiser Article]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
