BASIC RESEARCH
Code of the humans
New book by Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick explores how people acquired unique language skills.
“Human language is a generative system that determines an infinite set of possible semantic objects.”
— Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT
For many years, researchers tried to teach other kinds of animals some human language. Chimps, dolphins, gorillas — it didn’t seem to matter which animals they tried. Few experiments were regarded as success stories.
Small children, however, learn whichever language they are taught, and abundant evidence points toward the universality of human language. Platoons of linguists have detailed strong syntactical similarities among the world’s tongues. And biologists have begun to identify some of the genes involved in the development of speech and possibly language.
“Human language is a generative system that determines an infinite set of possible semantic objects,” says Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT.
“People don’t realize how uniform the human population is,” adds Robert C. Berwick, a computer scientist at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. “We’re all very alike as humans, and this language capacity is incredibly uniform. If you take a baby from Southern Africa and put it in Beijing, they’ll speak Chinese.”