HIST10014 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Noam Chomsky, Language Acquisition Device, Tabula Rasa
6 Aug 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Ability to speak and understand others" speech depends on implicit knowledge of native language. Ability to use language in thought and communication. Language is for communication enables declarative knowledge to be expressed and manipulated in distinctly human ways. Linguistic competence is implicit procedural knowledge eg. talking to ourselves characteristic feature of human reasoning and problem-solving. Speech unfolds rapidly over time as a stream of acoustic information. Intensity and frequency of sound determine what we hear. At a very perceptual level, the boundaries between successive words are not clearly marked. There are no reliable gaps between spoken words as there are between words on a page. Boundaries between intensity areas in the spectrogram don"t map onto pauses between words. Some pauses actually occur in the middle of words. No two instances of the same word ever sound physically identical the spoken form of words is a ected by other word pronunciation in surrounding sentence.
