15 Facts About Kanzi

Kanzi, known by the lexigram, was a male bonobo who was the subject of several studies on great ape language.

Kanzi was born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes Field Station at Emory University in 1980.

Shortly after birth, Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata, the matriarch of the group.

In 1985, Kanzi was moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University.

Kanzi was later relocated, along with his sister, Panbanisha, to the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa.

When he was eight years old, Kanzi was a subject of a research program in which his ability to respond to spoken requests was compared with that of a two-year-old human child called Alia.

Kanzi responded correctly to 74 percent of the instructions, Alia to 65 percent.

Whilst Kanzi spent a significant portion of his life around humans and being trained by them, the chimpanzees in the more recent study were not trained or demonstrated how to make or use flakes.

Kanzi picked up signs from American Sign Language from watching videos of Koko the gorilla, who communicated using signs to her keeper Penny Patterson; Savage-Rumbaugh did not realize Kanzi could sign until he signed, "You, Gorilla, Question", to anthropologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, who had previously worked closely with gorillas.

Nonetheless, it was noticed that every time Kanzi communicated with humans with specially-designed graphic symbols, he produced some vocalization.

Later, it was discovered that Kanzi was producing the articulatory equivalent of the symbols he was indicating, although in a very high pitch and with distortions.

The researcher asked Kanzi to go get the carrot in the microwave, Kanzi went directly to the microwave and completely ignored the carrot that was closer to him, but not in the microwave.

Alia, a human 2-year-old, did not know what to do, but Kanzi immediately used a spongy toy Halloween pumpkin as a ball and began to feed the toy.

For example, when Kanzi used "strawberry" it would be interpreted as a request to go to where the strawberries grow, a request to eat some, used as a name, and so on dependent on the handler's interpretation and context.

Kanzi showed no ability in the use of function words, nor could he make use of morphology, such as indicating the plural form of a noun, or syntax.