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 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 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 had spent his first 10 months in a research laboratory prior to being moved to a language study. But both chimps could use fragments of American Sign Language to make themselves understood.
Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on Noam Chomsky, the foremost theorist of human language structure and generative grammar at the time, who held that humans were "wired" to develop language.
Project Nim
Project Nim was an attempt to go further than Project Washoe. 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.
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 hadn't 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.
"For one thing, they say, there's no syntax – a basic requirement of language. Without combining words and then being able to switch combinations to change meaning, goes the argument, what animals use is more like a code than a language." 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.
Elizabeth Hess's book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human (Bantam, 2008) seems to argue against Terrace's project. One critic wrote that "Hess has written about animals and their advocates before (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter.) She is clearly an animal lover, yet (with a few exceptions) she resists the temptation to demonize the humans in Nim's life."
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.
Documentary Films: In production - A Discovery Productions documentary examining the controversy over the Nim study, examining if this was the case of an ape learning sign language or purely imitation. A BBC Films/ James Marsh documentary is also in production.
Objections
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 initiated the
Washoe Project. The Gardners argued that Terrace's approach to training, and the use of many different assistants, did not harness the chimpanzee's full cognitive and linguistic resources. This makes some sense, as it is a common opinion among professional educators that intellectual development does not blossom in an environment bereft of intimate emotional bonds and stability. The hypothetical often cited is to imagine a human child raised in a laboratory with no strong parental bonds being offered snacks as rewards for speaking. It is unlikely, in such an environment, that a child would possess strong communication skills. This is the type of environment Nim was in when the test was conducted.
Roger Fouts, of the Washoe Project, also claims that Project Nim was poorly conducted because it didn't use strong enough methodology to avoid such comparisons and efficiently defend against them. He also shares the Gardners' view that the process of acquiring language skills through natural social interactions gives substantially better results than behavioral conditioning. Fouts argues, based on his own experiments, that pure conditioning can lead to the use of language as a method mainly to get rewards rather than to raising communication abilities. Fouts later reported, however, that a community of ASL-speaking chimpanzees (including Washoe herself) was spontaneously using this language as a part of their internal communication system. They have even directly taught ASL signs to their children (Loulis) without human help or intervention. This means that not only can they use the language but that it has become a significant part of their lives.
The controversy is still not fully resolved, in part 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 was, will remain controversial.
Retirement and death
After his owners were reportedly going to sell Nim to a research lab, public involvement funded Nim's retirement to the Black Beauty Ranch, operated by The Fund for Animals, the group led by
Cleveland Amory, in
Texas. Nim died at the age of 26 from a heart attack.
Quotations
All quotations appear in the original article by Terrace and colleagues.
Three-sign quotations
Apple me eat
Banana Nim eat
Banana me eat
Drink me Nim
Eat Nim eat
Eat Nim me
Eat me Nim
Eat me eat
Finish hug Nim
Give me eat
Grape eat Nim
Hug me Nim
Me Nim eat
Me more eat
More eat Nim
Nut Nim nut
Play me Nim
Tickle me Nim
Tickle me eat
Yogurt Nim eat
Four-sign quotations
Banana Nim banana Nim
Banana eat me Nim
Banana me Nim me
Banana me eat banana
Drink Nim drink Nim
Drink eat drink eat
Drink eat me Nim
Eat Nim eat Nim
Eat drink eat drink
Eat grape eat Nim
Eat me Nim drink
Grape eat Nim eat
Grape eat me Nim
Me Nim eat me
Me eat drink more
Me eat me eat
Me gum me gum
Nim eat Nim eat
Play me Nim play
Tickle me Nim play
Longest recorded quotation
H.S. Terrace, in his article "How Nim Chimpsky Changed My Mind", quotes Nim's longest sentence as the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
See also
Ape language
Generative grammar (Chomsky)
Koko
Kanzi
Panzee and Panbanisha
Washoe
References
Further reading
Seidenberg, M.S. and Pettito, L.A. (1979). Signing behavior in apes: A critical review. Cognition 7: 177-215.
Terrace, H. S. (1979). Nim. New York: Knopf.
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784.
Wade, N. (1980). Does man alone have language? Apes reply in riddles, and a horse says neigh. Science, 208, 1349-1351.
Hess, E. (2008). Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. New York: Bantam.
External links
Famous Monkeys Through History (also includes famous apes)
Fund for Animals
Who2
'Test' results
A Philosophical Critical Analysis of Recent Ape-Language Studies
Category:Apes from language studies
Category:1973 animal births
Category:2000 animal deaths
Category:Famous chimpanzees
