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Article: Psychobabble: Grounding Language in the Brain.
- Article from:
- Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
- Article date:
- June 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Otago Polytechnic. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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1. INTRODUCTION
We tend to take language for granted. The ease with which children learn to speak--and our fluency as adults--fools us into thinking it is simple. Even when some find reading and writing difficult to learn, the literate among us still assume that some simple problem stands in the way of picking up these apparently easy skills.
But language is not simple. In fact Morten H Christiansen and Simon Kirby have gone so far as to call it the hardest problem in science. (1) Despite centuries of expertise with the formalities of language, and fifty years of modern scientific linguistic research, nobody really knows how human language works. Noam ...