Comprehensive information and links about Nim Chimpsky

Nim Chimpsky (1973-March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee who was the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace. Chimpsky was named in honor of linguist Noam Chomsky —the father of modern cognitive linguistics and a strong critic of animal research into language aquisition.

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Project Nim

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. One of Terrace's colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard criteria the true vocabulary count would be closer to 25 than 125. 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 behavior that rivaled human grammar. Nim's use of language was strictly pragmatic and used only as a means of obtaining an outcome, unlike a human child's who also uses language 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 were to question claims made on behalf of Washoe, and to argue that the apparently impressive results may have resulted from a relatively informal experimental approach.

Terrace's skeptical 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 make replication studies difficult to mount. The definitions of both "language" and "imitation" and the question of how language-like Nim's performance will remain controversial.

Critics of primate linguistic studies include animal psychologist Thomas Sebeok who stated:

dl"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."sup title="Needs citation"

Sebeok also made pointed comparisons of Washoe with Clever Hans. Some evolutionary psychologists argue that the apparent impossibility of teaching language to animals is indicative that the ability to use language is an innately human development (Pinker

Retirement and death

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.