Chomsky

[A. Katz]

Sheri,

What the Alex Studies were intended to investigate, and what we can learn 
from them may not be exactly the same.

I would disagree that he did not seem to acquire much syntax. In order to 
interpret Pepperberg's questions correctly, Alex had to be able to parse 
them. That's syntax.

Let's remember that language comprehension is no less important than 
production.

    --Aya


On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Sheri Wells-Jensen wrote:

> Folks,
> It's worth pointing out, I think, that the goal of the Alex studies and the ongoing studies of other parrots has been the investigation of parrot cognition not language  acquisition.  Dr. Pepperberg states quite clearly that Alex's utterances are meant as only a vehicle for him to demonstrate his various (impressive) abilities.
>
> He does not seem to have acquired much syntax at all, but it's fascinating to note  the other cognitive abilities he clearly has, demonstrated by the problems he can solve.
> It would be interesting to construct a list of the cognitive abilities necessary to manipulate a grammar accurately and compare those to what the parrots can do albeit in a nonlinguistic context.
>
> For what it's worth, there is quite a bit of phonetic detail in The Alex Studies if you want to see spectrograms and such of parrot speech.
>
> Peace,
> Sheri
>
>
> Sheri Wells-Jensen
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice*.edu] On Behalf Of Keith Johnson
> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 1:38 PM
> To: A.Katz
> Cc: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Chomsky
>
> Aya, discussing the problem of demonstrating that birds can talk, says:
>
> "If humans had to go through this to prove their children can really
> talk, they wouldn't fare much better."
>
> I think that this is a false statement, as evidenced by the years of
> research reported in journals like the "Journal of Child Language".
> Children are studied in controlled settings, and behave differently
> than nonhuman creatures do. My point is that the linguistic
> accomplishments of nonhuman species are quite different from those of
> humans.  This seems to be an observation that we should be able to
> explain.
>
> Barbara King argues that there are more interesting questions that
> whether nonhuman creatures have "language" or not.  But, I would say
> that if we are seeking to understand the organic basis of this human
> capacity we call language, then it is crucial that we understand
> whether the capacity for language is shared across species.
>
>
> Keith Johnson
> Professor of Linguistics
> University of California
> keithjohnson at berkeley.edu
>
>