Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

Thanks very much, and likewise! :)

By the "critical age" hypothesis, I understand you to mean the fact
that if a human is not exposed to language at a certain age they will
never pick it up properly.  What this proves as far as I'm concerned
is that there is a critical time for learning language; I don't think
one can argue with that.

However, even if language use were a highly specialized use of
independently existing cognitive skills, rather than a process which
is unique and different *in kind* than other cognitive skills, it
might be so extremely specialized that it requires the organism to be
absolutely primed to learn it, and that priming may be age-related.

As I understand it, it is very difficult for people blind from birth
whose sight is restored to learn to see -- the skill of turning
light-sensations on the retina into a three-dimensional world is far
from automatic, and if you don't grow up doing it, you may never quite
get it.  (The suicide rate among the congenitally blind whose sight is
restored is disturbingly high -- many cannot deal with the chaotic and
incomprehensible visual sensations they suddenly acquire.)   And yet
sight still involves general perceptual principles (which were
explored in a basic way by gestalt psychology in the early part of
this century, and which are being re-discovered, or rather discovered
in much greater mechanical detail, by connectionist congnitive
scientists, these days).

Hmm... analogy's not all that good, but I couldn't resist bringing up
that stuff about blind people.  All I mean to establish by it is that
the existence of a "critical age" for learning a skill doesn't mean
any more nor less than that there is a "critical age" for learning
that skill.

Chomskian claims tend to be much stronger -- that the structure of
syntax can be investigated independently from semantics; that language
is properly modeled by theories involving sequences of meaningless
tokens; things like that.  That's what gets me about it. :)


Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Tom Wier wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
>
> > I see Chomskians as essentially saying, "bat wings must have nothing
> > to do with fingers and arms, because they're just so different; they
> > must have evolved out of nowhere by a sudden mutation, and they must
> > be studied as if they had nothing to do with fingers and arms, or
> > forelegs and forepaws; indeed, as if they had nothing but aerodynamic
> > properties -- no muscles, no bones, no skin -- we must study them not
> > using biology, but using techniques developed to study airplane wings
> > or helicopter rotors."
>
> I see your point, but how do you explain things like the Critical
> Age Hypothesis (more or less a fact now)?  Though perhaps
> Chomsky overstates himself by not acknowledging the relationships
> between the linguistic faculties of the mind and what it shares with
> other mental faculties, it seems to me that the dichotomy is not
> *wholly* inappropriate.
>
> (BTW, I'd just like to point out that I always enjoy your posts;
> I find myself as often wanting to save them as needing to delete
> them for want of space)
>
> ===========================================
> Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
> AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
> <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
>
> "Things just ain't the way they used to was."
>      - a man on the subway
> ===========================================
>