What makes Kanzi special is his extraordinary linguistic skills compromising of over 3,000 known words as well as his ability to understand more complex verbs and phrases. 

 

Some of these sentence structures include. “Go get the ball that’s in the microwave” and “Put on the monster mask and scare Linda”

 

Kanzi was raised in a research environment since his birth in 1980 and has been under the study of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a psychologist and primatologist who has taught Kanzi since he was nearly two years old. 

 

Kanzi’s abilities started to manifest at an early age of Two when researchers had been teaching Kanzi’s adoptive mother, Matata. After the team had been working with Matata for a couple years, she had only been able to learn about twelve words. Kanzi, who was present during these instructions was seemingly not paying attention and played in the background. It was only until his mother’s absence that Kanzi started using the keyboarded lexigram to produce 120 distinct phrases. Kanzi had been paying attention all along. 

In the years to come, his vocabulary would grow and the 256 lexigram keyboard proved to inhabit his ability rather than progress it. Eventually Savage-Rumbaugh would test Kanzi’s ability to understand complex sentence structure such as requests. By Kanzi correctly performing a request such as, “Pour the lemonade in the coke”, it proved an observable level of comprehension. 

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