HENRY

Ok. Time for a catch up post. There’s just not enough hours in the day…

1: Native Language Governs The Way Toddlers Interpret Speech Sounds:

Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning

2: Claire Bowern’s started a new project for Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory which aims “to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements”. It’ll be exciting to see how this works out. Also take a look at the blog: Pama-Nyungan reconstruction, which is fronted with a lovely picture of a neighbor-net.

3: Oh the irony: Disney’s Baby Einstein videos that promise to enhance your babies brain power, don’t work. In fact, the babies who watched Baby Einstein videos had worse performance on language assessments. It’s almost as if it’s pseudo-science or something. More details are here…

4: Mark Liberman on Language Log has an interesting article on Fox P2 and bird song grammar:

…But to reify human speech and language abilities as a “parser” located in the caudate nucleus, regulated by FoxP2 and shared with finches — well, speculation is fun, but this is like the kind of too-specific science fiction that’s out of date by the time it’s published, and seems merely quaint within a few years.

5: Eric Cline in the Boston Globe says "Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It’s time to fight back":

NOAH’S ARK. The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The Exodus. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. All have been “found” in the last 10 years, including one within the past six months. The discoverers: a former SWAT team member; an investigator of ghosts, telepathy, and parapsychology; a filmmaker who calls himself “The Naked Archeologist”; and others, none of whom has any professional training in archeology.

Posted on October 2nd, 2007 by Simon Greenhill