Posted: Mar 07, 2010 12:08 pm
katja z wrote:
Yes, I remember learning about those experiments with apes in my psychology classes. I thought they were pretty impressive, but my teacher insisted that they didn't prove anything, that there was still some fundamental difference between humans and (other) animals. Oh, and humans had those special learning mechanisms and were special because they used tools and so on, you get the drift. I finally gave up and stopped arguing with him.
Yeah that's generally how the arguments go...katja z wrote:Er, let me disappoint you. The people I mentioned were almost all linguists. The whole English language department at my university seems to be in love with Chomsky, and not for his political analyses!
Oh that's sad..
I just did some quick research and apparently he's still quite popular in the US, so I don't know whether that's where you are or whether your university is heavily influenced by American thinking but from the linguists I've spoken with they all seemed to think he was fairly irrelevant. But my area is psychology, so I only tend to converse with linguists who have some scientific agenda, such as evolutionary history, neuroscience etc. so maybe those guys are a little different. I know that in science, particularly psychology, he is looked at as a mistaken relic.
katja z wrote:Thanks for the link on grammar learning in pigeons!
No problem. I love animal language studies
