Terrace, however, was skeptical of Project Washoe and, according to the critics, went to great lengths to discredit it.
However, the results, according to Fouts, were not as impressive as had been reported from the Washoe project. Īttention 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. 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. Since 98.7% of the DNA in humans and chimps is identical, some scientists (but not Noam Chomsky) believed that a chimpanzee raised in a human family, and using American Sign Language (ASL), would shed light on the way language is acquired and used by humans. 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. Project Nim was an attempt to go further than Project Washoe. Terrace's work remains controversial today, with no clear consensus among psychologists and cognitive scientists regarding the extent to which great apes can learn language. Terrace further argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation from the chimpanzees, which he also only noticed and examined in such a manner at and after said moment of realization. Mainly, Terrace claimed that he had noticed that Nim mimicked the signs used moments before by his teacher, which Terrace, by his own words, had not noticed throughout the duration of the entire study but only moments before thinking of greenlighting the study as a success. After reviewing the results, Terrace concluded that Nim, who at this point was housed at Columbia University, mimicked symbols of the American Sign Language from his teachers in order to get a reward but did not understand the language nor could he create sentences Nim used random patterns until receiving a reward. Allen and Beatrix Gardner in which another chimpanzee, Washoe, was raised like a human child. The project was similar to an earlier study by R. At the age of two Nim was removed from his surrogate parents, the familiar surrounding of their home and brought to Columbia University due to perceived behavioral difficulties. The surrogate parents already had a human child of their own. Īs part of a study intended to challenge Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language, beginning at two weeks old, Nim was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents. Within the context of a scientific study, Chimpsky was named as a pun on linguist Noam Chomsky, who posits that humans are "wired" to develop language. Terrace with the linguistic analysis headed up by psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Neam " Nim" Chimpsky (Novem– March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University.
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