Language Acquisition in Infants and Adults

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In chinese infants, long before they can do labial ofricaties and do ba or ba, they get the tone correct speech of pathologists. And for the state department an te intelligence agencies, the medium age for beginning chinese nis 35 or 36. For vocabulary, there is no critical period. We learn new words all our lives,. including names for people places. Syntax may be in one of these interminable cycles of revision and review. Doinge bargaining with journal referees to please publish our paper.

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Other ways to connect

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Follow Steven on Twitter
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.