In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a
remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use
language. A young ape, named "Nim Chimpsky" in a nod to the linguist
whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York
and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought
that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim's teachers
inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim
failed - not because Nim couldn't create sentences but because he
couldn't even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and
attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The
failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where
language comes from.
In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the
origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his
critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the
cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental
psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of
infant language acquisition, leading up to a child's first words. By
placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first
time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues
that this theory explains Nim's inability to acquire words and, more
broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why
Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful
statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.
