I did a Lexis-Nexis search for gorilla w/2 communication, choosing
'Major Papers' and got two items --one completely irrelevant, and another
(from 1995) announcing a talk to be given by Mitzi Phillips of the
Gorilla Foundation of Woodside CA (where Koko lives).
A search for gorilla w/2 language netted 14 documents, the first a
1996 story about Koko turning 25.
These are in and of themselves not terribly useful, but the do
point in some possibly useful directions: I have some names (Mitzi
Phillips, Koko, Gorilla Foundation) to consider searching, and I note
that the major papers haven't done much lately on gorilla
communication.
So I used AltaVista to see if "gorilla foundation" has a web site and
found a bunch of useful things:- The Gorilla Foundation (note that
there's a bibliography, which includes a 1997 article in a book
(The Problem of Meaning. A quick search of Annie reveals that we
don't have the book, but it looks like a good candidate for ILL).
-
I also discover a publication called Library Primate Newsletter
I decided to try a more inclusive online catalog, to see if there are
books I should know about that W&L doesn't have. My favorite is
Harvard's HOLLIS, and a search for kw gorilla communication did
turn up a number of items that I STORed
and had e-mailed to me.
I also did some searching in the general indexes available to us
(Periodical Abstracts Online and Expanded Academic Index) and found a
number of interesting possible sources. Critical here was the choice of
search terms: 'gorilla communication' wasn't very productive, so I had to
back up to the more general. In EAI I tried 'apes language' and
'apes communication', both of which were fruitful; and I was surprised to
find that 'apes language' found 75 items in PAO, several of which look
quite toothsome.