Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a primatologist at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, who is well-known for her work investigating the apparent use of 'language' in two bonobos — along with chimpanzees one of the two Great Ape species representing the closest living relative to humans. Her most famous subject is a bonobo named Kanzi, who can communicate using symbols on a keyboard.

Savage-Rumbaugh's view of language - that it is not confined to humans and is learnable by other ape species - is controversial within linguistics, psychology and other sciences of the brain and mind, the controversy involving different definitions of language and different understandings of evolutionary processes. For example, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker strongly criticised the position of Savage-Rumbaugh and others in his award-winning The Language Instinct, arguing that Kanzi and other non-human primates failed to grasp the fundamentals of language.