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>> Well surely that's a case of the range of the vocal chords? Parrots are another intelligent creature that has better range and they imitate all sorts of sounds. Parrots (and birds like mainas etc) immitate human sounds and all sorts of sounds, but they don't discriminate between, e.g., the sound made by a train whistle and the sound made by a human carer. I mean that a parrot will not learn to speak a human language by immitating its sounds, any more than it'll learn to speak train by immitating a train whistle. Human babies don't just immitate their parents' sounds, they figure out what those sounds do and how they come together to form language and express meaning. That is a small miracle that we don't understand at all well and Chomsky is 100% right to speak of scientific wonderment, in its context. It is really mind-blowing that kids can eventually learn to speak without, for the vast majority of children, anyone around them having any idea how to teach a kid to speak in any systematic way. Not to mention the trouble that adults have in learning another language even given formal training in it (which perhaps is further evidence that we really don't know how to teach language, because we don't understand how it works, so again, how can we teach small children to speak a language, but not adults?). Chomsky's universal grammar is really the simplest answer: children don't learn how to speak a human language, they already know how, and they only have to learn the vocabulary and syntax of the language of their parents. This only presuposes that humans have human biology, and that our biology is responsible for our language ability. We can't learn to fly because we don't have wings and parrots can't learn to speak because they don't have human brains. [Edit: that it's the simplest answer doesn't mean it's the right answer, only that it's got a damn good chance to be it.] |