Editorial use only . Nim Chimpsky and Joyce Butler, sign language trainer. Joyce, holding a photograph of an orange, makes the sign for What?, and Nim replies: Orange. Col. Univ. 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.