Language and the Mind Revisited - The Biolinguistic Turn

UC Berkeley presents the The Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lecture series, featuring linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky examines biolinguistics - the study of relations between physiology and speech.

Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [7/2003] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 7412]

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Noam
• Chomsky
• biolinguistics
• language

[WastedTourist]

Chomsky is like a juggernaught whenever he challenged about any point. He always immediately dismisses his challenger then proceeds on an amazing diatribe. Every time!

[cryptickripke]

@cryptickripke Chomsky is rather like Kant, who said "concepts without intuitions are empty"--we might say, "UG without language/society is empty." But Kant's next sentence was "intuitions without concepts are blind." Mere socialization may yield primitive communication, but it won't get you anything approaching language--for evidence, see every nonlinguistic animal society in natural history. You clearly need a special kind of brain to know a language. Whatever the "specialness" is, that's UG.

[emotionalinvalid]

@WastedTourist thanks for reminding us Mr. Dick Cheney. I really like your anon i.d. though

[Foneticaable]

Sorry, what's the word he said in .... 0;00;49. "And the.....has been learnt in the...

[kokopelli314]

@atreyu1210 Wouldn't any kind of "language acquisition device" require language, as a functional component? This would seem to be supported by the difficulty feral children have in acquiring language. It seems a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that language and it's generative functions are interdependent. At least up to a point.

[atreyu1210]

@atreyu1210 Please excuse the chain response (I ran out of characters). This critical period comes into effect for a child as long as there is some form of exposure to language; this is even applicable for non-spoken languages (e.g. sign language). This theory was originally ground-breaking, as it offset B.F. Skinner's (father of operant learning and conditioning) belief that humans may acquire language via rewards, and punishments associated with the use of language.

[atreyu1210]

@kokopelli314 Psychology and linguistics describe this "language acquisition device" as a mechanism that onsets from birth to puberty. This is a so-thought-of "critical period" in which a child can nearly effortlessly acquire, process, memorize, etc language, definitions, phonemes, etc. This theory has not (to my knowledge) been supported by any discoveries pointing to an actual mechanism. After puberty, one may see for him or herself that language requires a high amount of effortful processing.

[kokopelli314]

Halfway through his lecture Prof. Chomsky mentions the ecological concept of "umwelt" and again alludes to it in his answer about a "language acquisition device" and talks about the differing responses to a flower that his granddaughter, a chimp and a bee might have. The implication being that different species are hard-wired toward divergent bio-semiotic cues. Please someone correct me if I'm missing something, but isn't this putting the cart before the horse? Language emerges from biology.(?)