“Language” in the Prelinguistic Child

Abstract

My first exposure to studies of child language did not involve children at all. In 1974 I was living in a plantation-style, 37-room mansion on 13 acres of land in the Bronx with a very energetic (i.e., wild) male chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, attempting to raise him like a human child as part of a research project being conducted at Columbia University. The goal was to teach Nim American Sign Language (ASL), replicating and extending the pioneering work by Beatrice and Allen Gardner with their chimpanzee, Washoe. The project was headed by Herbert S. Terrace, who had been trained by B. F. Skinner and Thomas G. Bever, a former student of Noam Chomsky. Predictably, these men held radically different views about the nature of language; it was left to me to find a reconciliation of the behaviorist and mentalist perspectives that had eluded their mentors. Despite my relative inexperience, I was utterly convinced that I would achieve this goal. As embarrassing as it now seems, I thought I would reach across the evolutionary abyss and learn the structure of a chimpanzee's reality; I was going to do whatever was necessary in order to " talk to the animals."