is wired to a computer, so the word is then vocalized out loud by the computer. This helps Kanzi develop his vocabulary and enables him to communicate with researchers. One day, Rumbaugh used the computer to say to Kanzi, "Can you make the dog bite the snake?" It is believed Kanzi had never heard this sentence before. In answering the question, Kanzi searched among the objects present until he found a toy dog and a toy snake, put the snake in the dog's mouth, and used his thumb and finger to close the dog's mouth over the snake. In 2001, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, writing in the Financial Times, observed that Kanzi was "asked by an invisible interrogator through head-phones (to avoid cueing) to identify 35 different items in 180 trials. His success rate was 93 percent." In further testing, beginning when he was years old, Kanzi was asked 416 complex questions, responding correctly over 74% of the time. Kanzi has been observed verbalizing a meaningful noun to his sister. Kanzi relies highly on the lexigrams for communication, and frequently uses them to specify where he wants to go, or an item he wants to have. He does this by expressing his goal (location or object) first, and his action (go, chase, carry, give, etc.) last. This notified researchers that Kanzi's way of communicating was different from that of spoken English, especially because Kanzi would communicate many of his action words using simple gestures. In addition, Kanzi is frequently seen linking two action words together using the lexigrams, like "I Tickle", "Chase Hide", or "Chase Bite". These word combinations are not necessarily structured in a way that humans would use spoken English, but they closely resemble lists, consisting of preferred actions, in preferred order of Kanzi's social play. Because of this inconsistency of Kanzi's use of language with the spoken English language, many question whether Kanzi's understanding of English "crosses the boundary with true language". Attempts to mimic human speech and communication Great apes mimicking human speech is rare although some have attempted to do so, and Viki, a chimpanzee, is one of them. During the 1940s and 1950s, Keith and Catherine Hayes of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology began working with a chimpanzee named Viki in an attempt to get her to mimic human speech. After undergoing months of speech therapy, Viki became their success story. Viki learned to say