Kanzi is a bonobo (Pan paniscus) that fundamentally changed our understanding of nonhumans’ capability to learn human language. The presence of language in humans and its presumed lack in all other animals had been one of the enduring assumptions of comparative psychology. The broad appeal of the presumption of the uniqueness in human language is illustrated by centuries-old folklore from across the world about how people were given language, animals that had language, and/or people that could “talk” to animals. The assumption that language is unique to humanity was not even tested scientifically until the late 1800s (Furness 1916), but is definitely challenged by findings from Kanzi, and later participants in the studies at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Only since the 1960s have we successfully studied the language abilities of apes, our closest evolutionary relatives. This success was founded on the work of the Gardners (Gardner and...
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Lyn, H., Chenkin, B. (2022). Kanzi. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55065-7_1043
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