“Darwin concluded that language ability is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken.” Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. Can an ape create a sentence? Science, 206, 891–902.“The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 219–227. Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Automatic access of the meanings of words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics, 22, 1–31. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Pacific Linguistics Conference. Lenguage de Signos Nicaragüense: A pidgin sheds light on the “creole?” ASL. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist, 86, 65–79. X-bar syntax: A study of phrase structure. Linguistics and cognitive science: Problems and mysteries. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173–221.Ĭarroll, J. Ann Arbor: Karoma.īickerton, D., & commentators.
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