BBC

A History of Ideas: Language Acquisition

Gillian Anderson on Language Acquisition

Why are humans able to speak so easily? Is it because, as Plato believed, we are born knowing things? Or is the mind a blank slate on which experience writes, as John Locke and other Empiricists espoused. Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky has put forward a third way to explain why language comes to us from a very early age.

Want to hear more on this topic?

Here’s the whole episode from A History of Ideas – Barry Smith on Noam Chomsky and Human Language

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