BBC Horizon - Why Do We Talk? (Aired 11-10-09)

"Talking is something that is unique to humans, yet it still remains a mystery. Horizon meets the scientists beginning to unlock the secrets of speech - including a father who is filming every second of his son's first three years in order to discover how we learn to talk, the autistic savant who can speak more than 20 languages, and the first scientist to identify a gene that makes speech possible.

Horizon also hears from the godfather of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, the first to suggest that our ability to talk is innate. A unique experiment shows how a new alien language can emerge in just one afternoon, in a bid to understand where language comes from and why it is the way it is."
yellowcsays...

Watched the whole thing. Pretty interesting stuff, my favourite part was the autistic guy who knew 20 languages and counting. Just makes me think how different this world would be if we all had that honed ability but without the sacrifice of near every other function or a huge investment of time (he was easily picking up words of a new language within 10mins). I guess that applies to many of the things accomplished by some autistic people, what if we all head photographic memory at ease and other such amazing feats of the mind...

I also found it alarming how quickly I found it enticing to perform "The forbidden experiment" of isolating a child from birth with no outside influence for learning speech, to see how it would develop. It is of course impossibly cruel but the intrigue just makes you stop for a moment.

siftbotsays...

This video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by eric3579.

swedishfriendsays...

Haven't watched this yet but it would seem to me that all animals have language in some version. Ours is just the most complex in the abstract sense. Other animals may be able to communicate with finer detail on a less abstract level but I haven't seen the studies on that.

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