This is the story of the ten-year relationship between a pygmy chimpanzee and a scientist, which has called into question accepted ideas about the uniqueness of homo sapiens - particularly concerning human language and consciousness. to demonstrate that he could learn aspects language in the way that a child does. He is now able to understand and respond to complex spoken English sentences, and to produce strings of words through a computerized lexigram, in which he has invented his own rules of grammatic structure.