Nim Chimpsky
BY MELODİ BÜYÜKÖZER (PSYC/IV)
buyukozer@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
While I was looking at this year's Sundance Film Festival Documentary Competition, a film named Project Nim immediately captured my attention. Directed by James Marsh of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, Project Nim looks at the enthusiastic project of Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace.
Project Nim is about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee. In 1970s, at the 2 weeks of age, he was taken away from his mother and raised by new surrogate parents in a home environment. There, Nim was taught to use American Sign Language and communicate with his surrogate parents. As you probably have noticed, Nim has a striking name resemblance to the famous philosopher, cognitive scientist, linguist, political activist and 21th century intellectual Noam Chomsky. This resemblance is, of course, not a coincidence. According to Noam Chomsky, language is uniquely human. Being exposed to the same linguistic stimuli, while the human child will always develop an ability to understand and produce language, another young animal will neither understand nor produce language. According to Chomsky, this difference between a human child and another animal is due to the "Language Acquisition Device" which the animals lack. The experimenters of Project Nim aimed to show that language is not uniquely human by teaching Nim sign language and hoping that Nim Chimpsky would refute the argument of Noam Chomsky.
It should also be noted that this was not the first attempt towards teaching a chimpanzee sign language. There was Washoe of Allen and Gardner in 1960s. Washoe was raised just like human child since her birth with human parents and she learned around 350 signs/words and was able to communicate with her human parents using these signs. After the success of the Washoe Project, Terrace and colleagues tried to replicate the results of Washoe with Nim. So what happened? Nim learned almost 125 words. However, after watching the videotapes of Nim's behavior, Terrace observed that Nim almost always used the signs mimicking his trainers. This is obviously not similar to a human child's understanding and producing language. Moreover, Nim always used the signs in order to receive food so there is not really a difference between Nim's signing to receive food and Skinner's rat pushing levers to get food. Realizing all this, Terrace was skeptical about the language learning ability of the chimpanzees, which received negative comments from the Washoe researchers. They claimed that the Nim study was not successful because it was poorly conducted: Nim was mainly trained in a laboratory environment and he did not receive the same input as a human child learning in a natural environment.
So the Nim Chimpsky versus Noam Chomsky debate ended with the victory of Chomsky. However, the debates on the topic are still heated and results are rather controversial. Hopefully more research in the field will shed light on the issue eventually.