Back نيم تشيمبسكي Arabic Nim Chimpsky Catalan Nim Chimpsky Czech Nim Chimpsky Danish Nim Chimpsky Spanish Nim Chimpsky French Nim Chimpsky Italian 님 침스키 Korean Project Nim Dutch Nim Chimpsky Polish
 Nim Chimpsky pictured washing dishes. | |
| Sex | Male |
|---|---|
| Born | November 19, 1973 |
| Died | March 10, 2000 (aged 26) |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Named after | Noam Chomsky |
Neam "Nim" Chimpsky[1] (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University. The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace with the linguistic analysis headed up by psycholinguist Thomas Bever. 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.[2]
As part of a study intended to challenge Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language,[3] beginning at two weeks old, Nim was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents.[1] The surrogate parents already had a human child of their own.[4] At the age of two, Nim was removed from his surrogate parents and taken to Columbia University due to perceived behavioral difficulties.[4] The project was similar to an earlier study by R. Allen and Beatrix Gardner in which another chimpanzee, Washoe, was raised like a human child.[5] 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. 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.[6][7][1] 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.[8] 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.[citation needed]
- ^ a b c Terrace, Herbert; Petitto, L. A.; Sanders, R. J.; Bever, T. G. (November 23, 1979). "Can an ape create a sentence" (PDF). Science. 206 (4421): 891–902. Bibcode:1979Sci...206..891T. doi:10.1126/science.504995. PMID 504995. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 22, 2012. Retrieved November 2, 2011.
However objective analysis of our data, as well as those obtained by other studies, yielded no evidence of an ape's ability to use a grammar.
- ^ Radick, Gregory (2007). The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language. University of Chicago Press. p. 320.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Fouts01was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b "The Chimp That Learned Sign Language". NPR.org.
- ^ Berger, Joseph (July 3, 2011). "Chasing a Namer lost to Time". The New York Times.
- ^ Terrace, Herbert. "Project Nim — The Untold Story" (PDF). appstate.edu.
- ^ Chomsky, Noam (2007–2008). "On the Myth of Ape Language" (e-mail correspondence). Interviewed by Matt Aames Cucchiaro. Retrieved February 13, 2021 – via chomsky.info.
- ^ Terrace, Herbert S. (2019). Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can. Columbia University Press.
© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search