Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (born 1946) is a primatologist most famous for her work with two bonobos, Kanzi and Mulika, investigating their apparent use of "Great Ape language" using lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. She is also the co-author of
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind. In this 1994 book, she and science writer Roger Lewin have summarized her research at teaching chimpanzees to use a specially-designed keyboard to communicate with trainers.
She writes of her early concerns, "This absence of full comprehension in language-trained apes was, I felt strongly, a more fundamental criticism of ape-language research than the absence of syntax, as demonstrated by Terrace. Cooperative comprehension is fundamental to language, and two-way communication that does not reflect comprehension is not language, no matter what other attributes it may possess."
She details her reaction to an attack on such ape language work by behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, who "explained that, although the sequence of events might look like 'sustained and natural conversation,' it was in fact the result of strict conditioning procedures." She writes, "One issue that undoubtedly had provoked the behaviorists' attack was my conclusion that Sherman and Austin were exhibiting conscious intentionality during their communication--a clear red flag to those who believe behavior should simply be viewed as responses to external stimuli. As a result I became labeled a cognitive psychologist."
She writes that "Kanzi was clearly doing this (i.e., comprehending language). For so revolutionary a scientific claim as this, a persuasive body of data would be required, and as yet, I had only my notes of what Kanzi had done. Would anyone believe those? Would anyone believe anything without a number of detailed blind tests? I doubted it. I knew that convincing others would be a difficult task, but I also knew that if I were to focus too intently on proving everything Kanzi said or did, I would lose his natural engagement in the language process."
She concludes, "The ease with which Kanzi acquired a facility for symbolic communication not only tells us something about humans, and the assumed uniqueness of the human mind, but also something about apes and their cognitive competence in their natural state... The boundary wall between humans and apes has finally been breached."
