Nim Chimpsky and Joyce Butler, one of his trainers. Joyce signs "hug me." 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.