Project Nim: Language Skills In American Sign Language

Project Nim is a movie documenting the research project conducted by Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. The research project was established to determine whether a chimpanzee raised by humans from infancy, like a human child would be, could develop language skills in American Sign Language. He believed that if chimpanzees could be taught how to articulate what they were thinking about, it would be an incredible expansion of human communication and possibly give insight as to how language evolved. This was the main motivation to start Project Nim. Mr. Terrace implemented various learning settings with multiple teachers. It also documents Nim’s life after the project. Cognitive learning was used to teach Nim how to sign and communicate with humans. Nim’s progress was continuously documented after the project was taken over by Laura-Ann Petitto, relaying how quickly he processed the information that was being presented to him. His teachers studied his perception, attention, language, memory, and thinking.
Herbert Terrace called upon former graduate student Stephanie Lafarge, who studied psychoanalysis at Columbia University with Terrace. He wanted her to raise Nim as she would her own child, with new husband Wer Lafarge and their seven children. Stephanie had no knowledge …show more content…
Having been taking from his mother at such an early age, and ultimately exploited to his humanlike nature without regard to his primate nature. Dr. James Mahoney stated that there is no way to carry out research on animals and for it to be humane, which I completely agree with. Although, they did prove that Chimpanzees had the capacity for higher consciousness and language skills, the complete disregard for his quality of life at the end of the project made me very upset. Nim’s cognitive abilities were very impressive, and it’s quite amazing the amount of signs he was able to learn in the five years spent on the