Nominator's statement

In this and other publications, she and her colleagues present evidence that some apes have the ability of a normal 2+ year old child to comprehend language and the ability of a normal 1+ year old child to produce language (by pointing to lexigrams), thus challenging the prevailing view that language is unique to the human species. The most famous of her subjects is (or was) Kanzi, a chimpanzee of the bonobo species (pan paniscus).

comments

• The productions are mostly 1-2 word phrases that may not qualify as sentences, and so the ape's production achievement may seem insignficant. However, some linguists maintain (or recently did) that apes do not possess the ability to produce even words (as opposed to mere signs), much less sentences.

• critics often maintain that the multiword utterances to which the chimpanzee responds are not comprehended as sentences, i.e. phrases with a grammatical structure. But Savage-Rumbaugh et. al. have designed experiments and recorded data which, they maintain, shows that this criticism is mistaken, although she would agree that the comprehended grammatical structure is relatively simple.

• This research has been continued in the face of dismissive and even hostile appraisals by leading linguists, and the withdrawal of government funding as a result. "Clever Kanzi", one reviewer entitled his review, alluding to the notorious Clever Hans.