E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh

TL;DR: Comparisons of the language comprehension skills of a 2-year-old child and an 8 year-old bonobo who was raised in a language environment similar to that in which children are raised but specifically modified to be appropriate for an ape suggest that the potential for language comprehension preceded the appearance of speech by several million years at minimum.

TL;DR: It is held that stimulus-response contiguity is a significant parameter of learning only to the degree that the monkey visually attends to the directional movements of its hand in order to displace discriminanda as in the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus.

TL;DR: This paper summarizes a videotaped presentation of computerized training programs whereby an adult female chimpanzee, Lana, learned to use a joystick to remove from a screen the number of boxes appropriate to the value of a randomly selected Arabic numeral 1, 2, or 3.

TL;DR: Results from 3 warning stimulus-priming experiments that assessed hemisphere-specific activation and lateralization in 2 language-trained chimpanzees suggest that basic phylogenetic neuropsychological systems related to activation and priming processes may link nonhuman primate and human studies of lateralization.

TL;DR: Savage-Rumbaugh et al. as discussed by the authors demonstrated the ability of a young child and a bonobo chimpanzee to comprehend simple sentences and simple syntactic structures in an experimental setting, since experimental controls strictly precluded both child and bonobo from using any contextual assists in understanding the sentences spoken to them.