Word: nim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BORN. To Sun Myung Moon, 62, self-anointed messiah and founder of the Unification Church, which claims 3 million members around the world, and his wife, Korean-born Hak Ja Han, 40: a daughter, their 13th child; in Tarrytown, NY. Name: Jeung Jin Nim (March of Heart). Weight: 7 lbs. 8 oz. Moon, also born in Korea, was convicted in May of conspiracy to evade paying personal income tax and is awaiting sentencing...
Toward that goal, Terrace, with Laura Petitto, a student assistant, and other trainers, put Nim through 44 months of intensive sign-language drill, while treating him much as they would a child. In some ways the chimp was an apt student, learning, for example, to "sign" dirty when he wanted to use the potty or drink when he spotted someone sipping from a Thermos. Nonetheless, Nim never mastered even the rudiments of grammar or sentence construction. His speech, unlike that of children, did not grow in complexity. Nor did it show much spontaneity; 88% of the time he "talked" only...
Armed with his new insights, Terrace began reviewing the reports and video tapes of other experimenters. Careful study of the record showed the same patterns with other apes that Terrace had noted in the work with Nim. There were rarely any "spontaneous" utterances, and what had seemed at first glance to be original sentences now emerged as responses to questions, imitations of signs made by the teacher, or as rote-like repetitions of memorized combinations. For instance, when Lana, a chimp at Yerkes, said Pleas machine give apple, the first three words seemed to mean nothing more to her than...
...weasel talk" and "innuendo," considered suing him. Patterson accused Terrace of "rather muddleheaded methodology." But some of the other researchers are taking a long, hard look at their own work. Premack, now at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks that Terrace's tactic of trying to treat Nim like a human baby was "silly and ill-advised," but he agrees that animals are incapable of spontaneous conversation. The Rumbaughs maintain that their more recent experiments preclude the possibility of trainers giving cues, consciously or sub consciously, to the subjects, but they have their own reservations about the linguistic ability...
...whose honor Nim was named, he has no doubts. Says Noam Chomsky: "It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for hu man beings to teach them...