Peter Bradley

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there could have been Homo sapiens without language 50,000 years ago, the hypothesised time of the ‘Merge leap’ for Berwick and Chomsky, that is more or less when the ability to do recursion entered human brains and languages, then there is no reason that there still could not be pockets of humans without language, that is without recursive thought or expression. This seems like a strange prediction, but it should be easy enough to verify. Finding humans that not only lack but who are completely unable to understand or produce recursive language would be striking support for the UG/recursion ...more
How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
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