How children pick up a language: Chomsky supported (Humans)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 28, 2021, 15:05 (1181 days ago) @ David Turell

A full supporter:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/science/lila-gleitman-dead.html?campaign_id=2&em...

"Until the 1970s, most linguists believed that the structure of language existed out in the world, and that the human brain then learned it from infancy. Building on the work of her friend Noam Chomsky, Dr. Gleitman argued the opposite: that the structures, or syntax, of language were hard-wired into the brain from birth, and that children already had a sophisticated grasp of how they work.

“'The study of language acquisition, her primary scientific concern, was her field in a special sense,” Dr. Chomsky said in a statement. “She virtually created the field in its modern form and led in its impressive development ever since.”

"Dr. Chomsky, who like Dr. Gleitman received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, devised the theory. But it was Dr. Gleitman who figured out elegant ways to test it in the real world, starting with her own children.

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"With Barbara Landau, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, she showed how even blind children were able to learn “sighted” words like “look” and “see” — not by experiencing them in the world, but by inferring their meaning from their syntactic and semantic contexts. She conducted similar research on deaf students with another former student, Susan Goldin-Meadow, now at the University of Chicago.

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"Working with a colleague, John Trueswell, Dr. Gleitman studied first how children learn “hard” words — verbs, conceptual nouns — and then turned around and looked at how they learn concrete nouns and other “easy” words, which she argued were not as easy as they might seem."

Comment: Hard-wired syntax seems correct. Even obituaries teach us.