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#659 Nick Chater & Morten Christiansen - The Language Game; Language as a Game of Charades

The Dissenter

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How Can We Keep Up With Language?

How is it that we can comprehend the language and what other people are saying? Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So if you take arbitrary sounds, just a random set of noises or a squeak and a bang and a crash, and you put those into a sequence and you play them to people, they can only recall the order of about four sounds. Now, with language, of course, we're dealing with hundreds of phonemes, hundreds of speech sounds every minute. How on earth are we able to cope with this? And given that our memory seems to be so limited.? I think the answer is a very simple one, which is that we have to take that

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