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Every year she gets undergrads claiming how wonderful Koko is, and every year she assigns some articles on communication systems, design features of language, and methodological problems with the Koko research.
I was Vickie Fromkin's TA one year, and spoke with Ted Suppala a few times while in Rochester; they're two of the critics (Fromkin died in ... 2000?). I don't know that they've published.
Patterson et al. are the big Koko pushers. After the adult-Koko-language business didn't work out, they pushed kiddy-Koko: Patterson, Francine G P; Cohn, Ronald H (Journal of Pragmatics, 1988, 12, 1, Feb, 35-54; Word, 1990, 41, 2, Aug, 97-143). The later work focuses on pragmatics, comparing it to L1 acquisition, esp. among deaf kids. But it contains the same methodological flaws.
Petitto, Laura A; Seidenberg, Mark S (Brain and Language, 1979, 8, 2, Sept, 162-183), Terrace, Herbert S (The Sciences, 1982, 22, 9, Dec, 8-10) are two articles that debunk the research. There are more. MLA and LLBA would, no doubt, turn up more.
Suppala, an ASL researcher, has no problem just showing footage (that Patterson is proud of) to his students with little commentary. They typically provide their own debunking; adding the methodological problems allows Ted to share his derision with his students with few additional comments needed. In fact, he finds Patterson's research to be downright offensive, and Patterson to show his ignorance of ASL. Suppala is a native ASL speaker.
Most people don't say Koko can't learn some sort of communication. Chimps can, apes can, chickens and doves can. But she--and the other examples touted as animal language--have not learned any syntax or morphology, and has no phonology. Her speech isn't recursive, isn't regular, shows no inflection or capacity for inflection (or the grammatical categories that underpin inflection), and no awareness of phonological space. (While 'phonology' is usually considered to be how sounds pattern, sign languages also have phonology.) While there are similarities between Koko and children, note that Patterson puts it in the realm of pragmatics: in other words, when Koko's interacting with the researchers, by and large. Kids, even before they say their first word, have acquired a phonology. And by the two-word stage they clearly have syntax, and even grammatical and cognitive categories. But they suck at pragmatics, since that requires a different, frequently ritualized, kind of interaction; most kids will focus on nouns, with the single noun intended to convey most of a sentence. There's no way to show Koko does, or doesn't, have such intentions. Patterson winds up backtracking to show that Koko can match small children at what they're worst at, the part of language they typically acquire late.
Many people, typically *not* mainstream linguists or psycholinguists, like the Koko narrative. Some are in anthropology or sociology and we simply disagree (often fairly completely) as to what language is. Most Koko fans fall into the 'advocacy' camp, and want their research to be relevant to much more than just linguistics and language. The linguistics and psycholinguistics camp subjected Patterson's work to the same kind of scrutiny that they've subjected everybody else's work to; it's not like he's the first researcher to have his claim gutted, and ultimately accepted only by a minority of linguists.
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