Nim Chimpsky

Nim Chimpsky (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition (codenamed 6.001) at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace; the linguistic analysis was led by the psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on Noam Chomsky, a leading theorist on human language structure and generative grammar, who holds that humans are "wired" to develop language. Though usually called Nim Chimpsky, his full name was Neam Chimpsky, or Nim for short.

The validity of the study is disputed, as Terrace argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation from the chimps. R. Allen and Beatrix Gardner made a similar earlier study, called Project Washoe, in which another chimpanzee was raised like a human child. Washoe was given affection and participated in everyday social activity with her adoptive family. Her ability to communicate was far more developed than Nim's. Washoe lived 24 hours a day with her human family from birth. Nim at 2 weeks old was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents, as part of a study "conceived in the early 1970s as a challenge to Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language", but whose "data, along with data from other studies, yielded no evidence of an ape's ability to use a grammar". Both chimps could use fragments of American Sign Language to make themselves understood.

Project Nim was an attempt to go further than Project Washoe. Terrace and his colleagues aimed to use more thorough 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.

Roger Fouts wrote:

Since 98.7% of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists (but not Noam Chomsky) believed that a chimp raised in a human family, and using ASL (American Sign Language), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans. Project Nim, headed by behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace at Columbia University, was conceived in the early 1970s as a challenge to Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language.

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