Slide 3 of 37
Notes:
“Language is the most defining feature of human intelligence: without syntax--the orderly arrangement of verbal ideas--we would be little more clever than a chimpanzee. For a glimpse of life without syntax, we can look to the case of Joseph, an 11-year-old deaf boy. Because he could not hear spoken language and had never been exposed to fluent sign language, Joseph did not have the opportunity to learn syntax during the critical years of early childhood.
“As neurologist Oliver Sacks described him in Seeing Voices: ‘Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal--unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no infant could have.’”
Calvin, 1994. Scientific American
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/1990s/1994SciAmer.htm
