Monkey grammar

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Monkey grammar

A team of Harvard psychologists has proved that monkeys can tell the  
difference between a banana and a nabama.

  Well, maybe not exactly banana and nabama. After all, monkeys can’t  
talk. Even though a few chimps learned to sign, they’re hopeless at  
grammar and possess nothing even remotely resembling human language.  
Plus, three-syllable banana is a pretty long word for any primate. But  
14 tamarins did notice when researchers switched the order of the  
sounds in a series of two-syllable nonsense words.

Find out the significance of this research --- read the rest of the  
post on the Web of Language:  http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage


____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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