Related Animal Language Projects
The Nim Chimpsky project failed in its attempt to replicate the results of Washoe. This failure is attributed to poor teaching, and to Nim being consistently isolated in a sterile laboratory environment, and often confined in cages, for his entire life. Nim did most of his learning in a white eight-by-eight laboratory room (with one of the walls containing a one-way mirror), where he was often trained to use signs without the referent present. Living in this setting, Nim did not receive the same level of nurturing, affection, and life experience, and many have suggested that this impaired his cognitive development, as happens with human children subjected to such an environment.
The publication of the Washoe experiments spurred a revival in the scholarly study of sign language, due to widespread interest in questions it raised about the biological roots of language.
Read more about this topic: Washoe (chimpanzee)
Famous quotes containing the words related, animal, language and/or projects:
“The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The African race evidently are made to excel in that department which lies between the sensuousness and the intellectualwhat we call the elegant arts. These require rich and abundant animal nature, such as they possess; and if ever they become highly civilised, they will excel in music, dancing and elocution.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (18111896)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (18741946)