Nim Chimpsky[1] (November 19, 1973 – March 10, 2000) was a chimpanzee used in a study to determine whether chimps could learn a human language, American Sign Language (ASL). The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace of Columbia University with linguistic analysis by psycholinguist Thomas Bever.

2008年5月28日 · Project Nim was a research study conducted in the 1970s meant to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to sign. The study's chimp –- named Nim Chimpsky -– lived in a Manhattan brownstone with a...

2011年7月20日 · In 1973, an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment. The goal of the project was to see if the...

2019年8月5日 · Chomsky recently applied the theory of evolution to language by postulating a mutation that produced universal grammar about 100,000 years ago. Mutations, along with natural selection, are the two...

2019年10月11日 · It differs from that of Noam Chomsky, the world’s most prominent linguist, whose focus is on grammar. Instead of grammar, I will focus on words. Why words? From an evolutionary point of view, words are as different from any form of animal communication as they are from any grammar. They are therefore the first inevitable step towards language.

2019年10月11日 · In 1973, Herbert Terrace set out to do what no researcher had accomplished: to teach a chimpanzee to use simple aspects of language. Terrace arranged to have an infant chimp – named Nim Chimpsky, a poke at linguist Noam Chomsky, whose theories he challenged – cared for by a family not far from Columbia’s Morningside campus.

2012年12月10日 · Nearly 1,000 medical research chimps warehoused in medical labs. Dec. 10, 2012 -- Nim, a baby chimpanzee, was taken screaming from his sedated mother days after his birth in 1973 at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, then given to a large New York City family to be raised among humans.

2017年5月8日 · Terrace, a behavioural psychologist, wished to test Noam Chomsky’s claim that language, as humans used it, was a unique and innate capacity of the human brain. If a chimpanzee, brought up in human society, could learn to converse in some way with humans, that much language at least would be shown to be the product of culture, a learned behaviour.

In your Review of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, you challenged his belief that language is acquired through training and in principle could be learned by other animals as well.

2011年7月7日 · Documentary filmmaker James Marsh recounts the efforts of a Columbia University psychology professor to teach a chimp sign language in Project Nim. Critic David Edelstein says the brilliant...