Francine Patterson

Binti Jua is a female western lowland gorilla resident at the Brookfield Zoo, in Brookfield, Illinois, outside Chicago, United States. She received media attention after a situation in 1996 in which she tended to a three-year-old boy who had been injured by falling into her enclosure.

Ronald Herbert Cohn was an American zoologist who was a long-time research collaborator of psychologist Francine Patterson in her work in training Koko the gorilla in the use of American sign language. He documented much of Koko's life on film and on camera, and is credited as the illustrator for the children's books Koko's Kitten, Koko-Love!: Conversations With a Signing Gorilla, and Koko's Story. One of his photos of Koko was featured on the cover of National Geographic in 1978 and 1985.

Chantek, born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, was a male hybrid Sumatran/Bornean orangutan who acquired the use of a number of intellectual skills, including some modified American Sign Language (ASL), taught by American anthropologists Lyn Miles and Ann Southcombe. In Malay and Indonesian, cantik means "lovely" or "beautiful".

The Mind of an Ape is a 1983 book by David Premack and his wife Ann James Premack. The authors argue that it is possible to teach language to (non-human) great apes. They write: "We now know that someone who comprehends speech must know language, even if he or she cannot produce it."

Cecil Holden Patterson (1912–2006) was an American psychologist and writer. He was an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. He worked directly with Carl Rogers and practiced person-centered (Rogerian) therapy throughout his career.

The Gorilla Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 1976 by Francine Patterson and Ronald Cohn with Barbara F. Hiller.

Michael was a male gorilla involved in experiments to teach apes sign language. He is alleged to have had a working vocabulary of over 600 signs in American Sign Language, taught to him by Koko, a female gorilla; Francine Patterson; and other staff of Stanford University. Michael, an orphan, spent most of his life in Woodside, California, where he became known for painting. Both Michael and Koko’s linguistic abilities are widely rejected by specialists, despite popular perception to the contrary.

Interspecies communication is communication between different species of animals, plants, or microorganisms. Although researchers have explored the topic for many years, only recently has interspecies communication been recognized as an established field of inquiry.

Jody Weiner is an American novelist, non-fiction author, film producer and lawyer.

A talking animal or speaking animal is any non-human animal that can produce sounds or gestures resembling those of a human language. Several species or groups of animals have developed forms of communication which superficially resemble verbal language, however, these usually are not considered a language because they lack one or more of the defining characteristics, e.g. grammar, syntax, recursion, and displacement. Researchers have been successful in teaching some animals to make gestures similar to sign language, although whether this should be considered a language has been disputed.

Ndume is a male western lowland gorilla known for having learned a number of signs adapted from American Sign Language (ASL) and for being at the center of lawsuit over his custody between the Cincinnati Zoo and the Gorilla Foundation. Ndume has lived most of his life at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California, but has also lived at the Cincinnati Zoo and the Brookfield Zoo. Following a lawsuit, Ndume was transferred back to the Cincinnati Zoo from the Gorilla Foundation on June 14, 2019.