lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (03/17/90)
From article <1990Mar16.104707.29360@hellgate.utah.edu>, by kbreinho%ug.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Keith Breinholt): >... Children are not born with the ability to >pronounce words or control _any_ of the hardware delivered with the unit. That's putting it pretty strongly, isn't it? They don't need much special instruction to breathe. That's one of the many abilities you need for pronouncing words. They are born with some control over lips and tongue ... >... Children are not born with the ability to understand a spoken language. >When was the last time you told your child how to construct a sentence? Er, how does one construct a sentence, anyhow? Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
lishka@uwslh.slh.wisc.edu (Chris Lishka (a.k.a. Chri) ) (03/20/90)
>From article <1990Mar16.104707.29360@hellgate.utah.edu>, by kbreinho%ug.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Keith Breinholt): >>... Children are not born with the ability to understand a spoken language. >>When was the last time you told your child how to construct a sentence? According to Chomsky, children *are* born with some innate ability to understand spoken language. The evidence for this comes from many studies which discovered that children around the world fail to make some simple logical errors during the learning of a primary language. Before taking a linguistics course I used to firmly believe in the "nuture" side of the "nurture/nature" debate. I was amazed to find that humans do have at least some innate ability to aquire language (at least at a young age). -- Christopher Lishka 608-262-4485 "Somebody said to me, `But the Beatles were Wisconsin State Lab. of Hygiene antimaterialistic.' That's a huge myth. John lishka@uwslh.slh.wisc.edu and I literally used to sit down and say `Now, uunet!uwvax!uwslh!lishka let's write a swimming pool'."--Paul McCartney