File:Nim Chimpsky.jpg

Nim Chimpsky (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. Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on linguist Noam Chomsky, who posits that humans are "wired" to develop language.[1] Though usually called Nim Chimpsky, his full name was Neam Chimpsky, or Nim for short.[2]

Beginning at two weeks old, Nim was raised by a family in a home environment by human surrogate parents,[2] as part of a study intended to challenge Chomsky's thesis that only humans have language.[3] 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.[4] After reviewing the results, Terrace concluded that Nim 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 and used random patterns until receiving a reward.[5][6][2] Terrace further argued that all ape-language studies, including Project Nim, were based on misinformation from the chimps.[7] 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.