[Sigia-l] Findability

[Holly Hanna]

I would strongly recommend Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ for 
those interested in linguistics and human language in general.  He has 
some interesting things to say about apes being taught language, one of 
the most interesting being that the hearing trainers were much more 
willing to ascribe an ASL sign to a chimpanzee than a deaf, ASL-using trainer 
was.

Holly

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 frank.shepard at att.net wrote:

> In response to Karl's post about apes and language, here's an excerpt from a
> recent NYT article (July 15, 2003)
> 
> "Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and
> output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even
> dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in
> gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of
> language is words and syntax, each generated by a
> combinatorial system in the brain. 
> 
> If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary
> would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer
> than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another.
> But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a
> copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available.
> 
> Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of
> 60,000 words. 
> 
> The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical
> ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning. 
> 
> Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems.
> They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or
> so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that
> suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any
> poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap
> to some extent with that of people: they can recognize
> other individuals in their community and keep track of who
> is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding
> these thoughts in language."
> 
> Here's a link to the full article: 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html?ex=1059457160&ei=1&en=9043
> 0f42e7e84e07
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