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 Great Ape 'language' in two bonobos - a species very close to chimpanzees. Her most famous subject was a bonobo named Kanzi, who was claimed to be able to communicate linguistically 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 very controversial within linguistics, psychology and other sciences of the brain and mind. 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.