Nim Chimpsky
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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 the subject of dispute, as Terrace argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation--from the chimps. Drs. R. Allen and Beatrix Gardner did a similar study known as Project Washoe, in which the chimpanzee was also 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. Nim lived 24 hours a day with his human family from birth; Washoe had spent her first 10 months in a research laboratory prior to being moved to a language study. But both chimps could use sign language to make themselves understood.
Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on that of Noam Chomsky, the foremost theorist of human language structure and generative grammar at the time, who held that humans alone were "hard wired" to develop language.
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[edit] 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 has written: "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." [1]
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 sceptical of Project Washoe and, 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."[2] One of Terrace's colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard criteria Nim's true vocabulary count would be closer to 25 than 125. But other students who cared for Nim longer than Petitto disagreed with her and with the way that Terrace was conducting 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 in a manner that constitute 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."[3]
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 the "Clever Hans" effect (in which a horse that apparently understood language and could respond to questions was shown to have merely been a subject of operant conditioning) and a relatively informal experimental approach.
Critics of primate linguistic studies also 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." (Wade, 1980).
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 (Pinker & Bloom, 1990).
[edit] 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 example often cited is to imagine a human child raised in a laboratory with no strong bonds to any parental figures, being offered snacks as rewards for speaking -- it is highly unlikely, in such an environment, that a child would possess strong communication skills. This is exactly the type of environment that Nim was put into when the test had to be conducted, but when he was raised, he was raised as if he was a human by a human family.
Roger Fouts, of the Washoe Project, also claims that Project Nim was poorly conducted because it didn't have strong enough methodology to avoid such comparisons and efficiently defend from them[clarify]. 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.[1]
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. Moreover, Project Nim Chimpsky so discredited the whole endeavor that no funding has been provided since. The definitions of both "language" and "imitation," and the question of how language-like Nim's performance was, will remain controversial.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Quotations
[edit] 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
[edit] 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
[edit] 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."
[edit] See also
[edit] 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
[edit] References
- ^ Fouts, Roger. 1991. Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
- 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.
