Sarah (full name Sarah Anne) (August 1959 – July 2019) was an enculturated research

chimpanzee The chimpanzee (; ''Pan troglodytes''), also simply known as the chimp, is a species of Hominidae, great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close rel ...

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 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 language, even ...

'', 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 dep ...

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, along with three other chimpanzees, 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 a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''pa ...

and also produce streams of tokens which obeyed a

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

. 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 constructs that perform different computations or actions or return different values depending on t ...

. 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 small heads, relatively short necks and slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. ...

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 (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

, where she lived and worked with other enculturated chimpanzees: Kermit, Darrell, Bobby, Sheba, Keeli, Ivy, Harper, and Emma. In January 2006, Sarah attacked a student, causing minor injuries. The following month, the Chimp Center was closed and OSU sent the chimps to a private animal collection in Texas. Subsequently, the chimps were transferred to another chimpanzee sanctuary, Chimp Haven, in Louisiana. At Chimp Haven, Sarah was known for her blanket nesting techniques. Her favorite treat was

M&M's M&M's are color-varied sugar-coated dragée chocolate confectionery by the Mars Wrigley Confectionery division of Mars Inc.. The candy consists of a candy shell surrounding a filling which determines the specific type of M&M's. Each piece has ...

. 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
Individual apes involved in language studies Ohio State University Individual chimpanzees Animal communication 1962 animal births Primate attacks {{Primate-stub

See also

References

External links