Sarah was the chimpanzee in David Premack's studies who used plastic language tokens on a board.
Sarah was an enculturated chimpanzee whose cognitive abilities were documented by psychologist David Premack and Ann James Premack. Beginning in 1967, she learned to use colored plastic tokens that could be placed on a magnetic board. Each token represented a word or concept, but the tokens did not visually resemble the things they denoted.
Premack used the system to investigate whether a chimpanzee could learn symbolic relations and basic grammar. Sarah produced and interpreted token sequences involving names, actions, objects, negation, questions, and conditional statements. She could distinguish grammatical arrangements such as commands and negative sentences, and she learned that changing token order could change meaning.
Sarah was not the same animal as Lucy or Viki. Lucy and Viki are associated with other primate-language programs, while Lana used a computer-based lexigram system developed by Duane Rumbaugh and colleagues. Sarah’s work became especially well known through The Mind of an Ape, published by the Premacks in 1983.