Nim Chimpsky

In the early 1970s, Columbia University psychology professor Herbert Terrace launched a radical new study into language acquisition. He took a 2-week-old chimpanzee from its mother’s arms and deposited it into a freewheeling hippie household in Manhattan, where the chimp was breastfed by a human “mother” and treated as a member of the family. The project aimed to solve the nature/nurture question once and for all: Could a chimpanzee raised as a human learn to communicate what he was thinking and feeling?

Though Nim Chimpsky, as he was named, learned more than 100 words in sign language, the project did not result in any definitive answers about language acquisition. And in its aftermath, Nim—not human, yet not fully chimp either—was essentially abandoned. Project Nim, an unsettling new documentary by James Marsh, director of the equally brilliant Man on Wire, tells the story of Nim’s life during the experiment, and in the decades that followed.

http://citypaper.com/film/em-project-nim-em-1.1186191