Nim Chimpsky with trainer and researcher Joyce Butler. Nim uses the sign "dirty" when he wants to use the bathroom or when he wants to avoid chores or work. Project Nim was an extended study of animal language acquisition (codenamed 6.001) at Columbia University, led by Herbert S. Terrace; the linguistic analysis was led by the psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on Noam Chomsky, a leading theorist on human language structure and generative grammar, who holds that humans are "wired" to develop language.