Nim Chimpsky (1973-2000) was a chimpanzee named in mock honor of linguist Noam Chomsky. He was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace.
Project Nim was an attempt to replicate Project Washoe, in which it was claimed that the chimpanzee Washoe learned to understand and use American Sign Language. Terrace and his colleagues aimed to use more rigorous experimental techniques, and the intellectual discipline of the experimental analysis of behavior, so that the linguistic abilities of the apes could be put on a more secure footing. Attention was particularly focused on Nim's ability to make different responses to different sequences of signs, and to emit different sequences in order to communicate different meanings.
However, the results were not as impressive as had been reported from the Washoe project, and from another project with the gorilla Koko. While Nim did learn 125 signs, the study concluded that he hadn't acquired anything the researchers were prepared to designate worthy of the name "language" although he had learned to repeat his trainers' signs in appropriate contexts. Nim's longest recorded utterance was "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." Terrace and his colleagues concluded that the chimpanzee did not show any meaningful sequential behaviour that rivalled human grammar, and indeed that there was nothing that Nim could be taught that could not equally well be taught to a pigeon using the principles of operant conditioning. They were therefore led to question the claims that had been made on behalf of Washoe, and to argue that the apparently impressive results may have resulted from a relatively informal experimental approach.
Terrace's sceptical approach to the claims that chimpanzees could learn and understand sign language led to heated disputes with Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who led the Washoe project. The Gardners argued that Terrace's more formal approach to training, and the use of many different assistants, did not harness the chimpanzee's full cognitive and linguistic resources. The position is still not fully resolved, because the financial and other costs of carrying out language training experiments with apes mean that replications are difficult to justify. The definitions of both "language" and "imitation", as well as the question of just how language-like Nim's performance was, remain controversial.
After his owners were reportedly going to sell Nim to a research lab, public involvement funded Nim's retirement to a ranch in Texas, where he died at the age of 26 from a heart attack.
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Other famous language-learning non-human primates:
Quotations
Three-sign quotations
Four-sign quotations
See also
External links
Reference
Terrace, H. S. (1979). Nim. New York: Knopf.