Language is the stuff of thought -- the more we know about it, the better we will understand ourselves. These speakers are trying to crack the mystery.
Linguist Steven Pinker inspects the structure of sentences -- and discovers insight into human nature. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh finds a key to human language in the behavior of bonobo apes -- just as paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged shows us a set of 3.3-million-year-old hominid fossils that offer clues to the origins of speech. Erin McKean, meanwhile, gleefully collects and catalogs the products of modern wordmakers into a dictionary without limits.
New talks are released weekly. Subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feeds, and be the first to know ...
Sign in to add comments or Join (It's free and fast!)
As Susan Savage-Rumbaugh and others continue to point out the language capacity of non-humans, a fair analysis of what language is is going to once again have to return to B.F. Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" model as a potent source of research inspiration and fodder.