Nim Chimpsky - Objections

Objections

Terrace's skeptical approach to the claims that chimpanzees could learn and understand sign language led to heated disputes with Allen and Beatrix 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 hypothetical often cited is to imagine a human child raised in a laboratory with no strong parental bonds being offered snacks as rewards for speaking. It is unlikely, in such an environment, that a child would possess strong communication skills. This is the type of environment Nim was in when the test was conducted.

Roger Fouts, of the Washoe Project, also claims that Project Nim was poorly conducted because it did not use strong enough methodology to avoid such comparisons and efficiently defend against them. 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 of getting rewards rather than of 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.

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. The definitions of both "language" and "imitation", and the question of how language-like Nim's performance was, will remain controversial.