Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

For more than twenty years, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been studying the linguistic and cognitive skills of a number of laboratory-reared primates. Recently, her work with Kanzi (a bonobo) has been acknowledged as having achieved a scientific breakthrough of stunning proportions: Kanzi has acquired linguistic and cognitive skills equal to those of a 2-1/2 year-old human child.
Apes, Language and the Human Mind skillfully combines the exciting narrative regarding the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind.

'...the ape-language studies of Savage-Rumbaugh and others are, in their methods if not their conclusions, classically Cartesian. From them we have learned an extraordinary amount about the cognitive and communicative skills of apes immersed in human society.' (Robert Seyfarth, Nature)

'...The study of Kanzi's comprehension is fascinating, in part because it creates so many interesting questions about the extent of his synactic and cognitive abilities and their similarity to human abilities.' (Robert W. Mitchell, Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol 3, No. 6)