Nim Chimpsky

Daniel García Briones
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, the foremost theorist of 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 which 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.”
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, according to Fouts, were not as impressive as
had been reported from the Washoe project. Terrace, however, was skeptical of Project
Washoe and, according to the critics, went to great lengths to discredit it.
While Nim did learn 125 signs, Terrace concluded that he had not acquired anything the
researchers were prepared to designate worthy of the name "language" (as defined by
Noam Chomsky) although he had learned to repeat his trainers' signs in appropriate
contexts. Language is defined as a "doubly articulated" system, in which signs are
formed for objects and states and then combined syntactically, in ways that determine
how their meanings will be understood. For example, "man bites dog" and "dog bites
man" use the same set of words but because of their ordering will be understood by
speakers of English as denoting very different meanings.
One of Terrace's colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard
criteria, Nim's true vocabulary count was closer to 25 than 125. However, other
students who cared for Nim longer than Petitto disagreed with her and with the way
that Terrace conducted his experiment. Critics assert that Terrace used his analysis to
destroy the movement of ape-language research. Terrace argued that none of the
chimps were using language, because they could learn signs but could not form them
syntactically as language, as described above.
Terrace and his colleagues concluded that the chimpanzee did not show any meaningful
sequential behavior that rivaled human grammar. Nim's use of language was strictly
pragmatic, as a means of obtaining an outcome, unlike a human child's, which can serve
to generate or express meanings, thoughts or ideas. There was nothing Nim could be
taught that could not equally well be taught to a pigeon using the principles of operant
conditioning. The researchers therefore questioned claims made on behalf of Washoe,
and argued that the apparently impressive results may have amounted to nothing more
than a "Clever Hans" effect, not to mention a relatively informal experimental approach.
Critics of primate linguistic studies include Thomas Sebeok, American semiotician and
investigator of nonhuman communication systems, who wrote:
“In my opinion, the alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups:
one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Terrace. The largest
class by far is the middle one.”
Sebeok also made pointed comparisons of Washoe with Clever Hans. Some evolutionary
psychologists, in effect agreeing with Chomsky, argue that the apparent impossibility of
teaching language to animals is indicative that the ability to use language is an innately
human development.
Referencia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky visto: 04:16 pm, 25 de Octubre de

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Daniel García Briones

Roger Fouts wrote:

Attention was particularly focused on Nim's ability to make different responses to

Referencia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky visto: 04:16 pm, 25 de Octubre de

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