Part 4/4 Christopher & Language Acquisition (Linguistics)

[jayjaypen2]

How Prof Man get ethical permission to teach the poor man a pseudo language and waste his time?

[AdamuSensei]

I am jealous of this Christopher dude. Well, not the autism, but the language-learning ability. I do think this video also shows how little (unfortunately) Chomskyan linguistics gets challenged, but simply gets evaluated within its own theoretical framework.

[Arissef]

Chomsky was criticised for basing his ideas too heavily on the English Language.

[newrationalism]

Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar does not refer to languages like English, or French, etc.

UG refers to Language (with a big L) and by this we mean the structure and features which underpin all languages (English, French, Buntu, etc). This is why it is such a powerful theory.

[mortemdei]

well... I must have to disagree... GB and Minimalism are based on English an other "normal languages" very rare and atypical languages can only be threated with awkward movement ops, because the underlying structure is that of a "normal language".

An other heavy critic to his theory comes from neurolinguistics, namely from Sydney Lamb. Relational network theory explains much better things like L1-l2 interference (my field of work) or "puns".

[Sanhadrian]

I remember watching a show about Genie on the Discovery Channel once. Perhaps they'll rerun it someday.

[chrismca]

Thanks for posting this, absolutely fascinating. Have you read "A man without words" by Susan Schaller? I think you'd like it.

[newrationalism]

Terrific, thank you.

[Davey1977]

I already knew about Christopher, but this is the first time I've ever seen or heard him.

Thanks so much for posting this, it's very fascinating!

[newrationalism]

You're very welcome. Fascinating indeed. Perhaps you also know about the feral child, "Genie"? I haven't been able to find any videos about her but hope someone might share something using this forum.