Sarah (full name Sarah Anne) (August 1959 – July 2019) was an enculturated research chimpanzee whose cognitive skills were documented in the 1983 book ''

The Mind of an Ape ''The Mind of an Ape'' is a 1983 book by David Premack and his wife Ann James Premack. The authors argue that it is possible to teach language to (non-human) great apes. They write: "We now know that someone who comprehends speech must know langua ...

'', by

David Premack David Premack (October 26, 1925 – June 11, 2015) was an American psychologist who was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was educated at the University of Minnesota when logical positivism was in full bloom. The de ...

and Ann James Premack.Premack, David and Premack, Ann James. ''

''. . Sarah was one of nine chimpanzees in David Premack's psychology laboratory in Pennsylvania. Sarah was born in Africa in 1959. She first worked in Missouri, then in Santa Barbara, and then Pennsylvania. She first was exposed to language token training in 1967. Sarah was the subject, along with three other chimpanzees which were exposed to language token training. One of the chimpanzees failed to learn a single word, but Sarah, Elizabeth, and Peony were able to

parse Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...

and also produce streams of tokens which obeyed a

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domain ...

. She used a special board with plastic symbols to correctly parse various syntactic expressions including

if-then-else In computer science, conditionals (that is, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs,) are programming language commands for handling decisions. Specifically, conditionals perform different computations or actio ...

. Sarah was even able to recognize colors and connect them with matching objects, a talent that Premack noted doubting that a

pigeon Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primarily ...

could have. When the Premacks decided they no longer wanted to work with chimpanzees in 1987, Sarah was sent to Sarah Boysen's Chimp Center at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

, where she lived and worked with other enculturated chimpanzees: Kermit, Darrell, Bobby, Sheba, Keeli, Ivy, Harper, and Emma. In February 2006, the Chimp Center was closed and OSU sent the chimps to a private animal collection in Texas, and subsequently transferred to another chimpanzee sanctuary,

Chimp Haven Chimp Haven is a non-profit sanctuary for more than 300 chimpanzees retired from laboratory research. The sanctuary is located in Eddie D. Jones Nature Park in Keithville, Louisiana, approximately southwest of Shreveport. History In addition ...

, in Louisiana, where she was well known for her blanket nesting techniques. Her favorite treat was

M&M's M&M's (stylized as m&m's) are multi-colored button-shaped chocolates, each of which has the letter "m" printed in lower case in white on one side, consisting of a candy shell surrounding a filling which varies depending upon the variety of M&M ...

. Sarah died in July 2019, just before her 60th birthday.

References

External links

A picture of Sarah at Chimp Haven, from ''The New York Times'', Nov 8, 2011
Apes from language studies Ohio State University Individual chimpanzees Animal communication 1962 animal births {{Primate-stub

See also

References

External links