Nim Chimpsky

One of them even has an ape named after them.

[gentle music] Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee that was raised in New York, wore human clothes, and was taught American Sign Language from birth.

This project was intended to test if a non-human primate could acquire actual grammar, but really it was set up to settle the debate between two schools of thought on the subject.

That is Skinner versus Chomsky.

Nim Chimpsky was named after Noam Chomsky, a linguist who had presented his thinking on whether or not other species were able to learn grammar at all.

His argument was that language isn't entirely a learned behavior.

He said that humans are born with an innate capacity for grammar and linguistics that other species are simply not capable of, which is why toddlers are able to create sentences that they haven't heard before, and other animals can only repeat what they have heard humans say.

You learn from the whole experience, and then you adjust your future behavior accordingly.

That's the problem with animal thinking.

Animal thinking, like you could give Nim Chimpsky, very highly trained, intelligent chimpanzee.

You can give Niemczynski 200 words in American Sign Language, but they all have a sensorial correlate.

So you hold up the sign for banana, and then you show a banana, and the chimp starts getting it.

He was a Columbia psychologist who set out to show that apes could learn language and to prove Noam Chomsky wrong.

Chomsky wrote that real language was uniquely human, and Terrace wanted to break that claim so badly that he named his baby chimp, Nim Chimpsky, just to troll him.

And Terrace filmed everything.

For four years, Nim learned signs, over a hundred of them, and strung them into what looked like little sentences.