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« Phonology Group | Main | Logic Lecture at Smith»
Michael Frank in the Acquisition Lab
Michael Frank
MIT
Monday, December 10, 12:15 pm, in the Partee Room
Abstract
A foundational assumption of researchers interested in the universals of human language is that languages can be studied independent of the cultural context and the non-linguistic cognitive abilities of their speakers. But it's not clear this assumption is warranted. Everett (2005) described the case of the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe whose language (he claimed) is finite, who have no words for colors or numbers, no quantifiers, and maybe even a generalized, cultural constraint against abstraction that causes all of these limitations. The validity of all of these claims is an open question. In this talk I will discuss some initial results of experiments attempting to test these claims, collected during a visit to the Pirahã village in January of 2007.