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Thomas G. Bever: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from Thomas G. Bever, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• A chimp learned 125 signs - but never actually learned grammar

  In the 1970s Herbert Terrace raised a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky (a jab at Noam Chomsky) and taught him American Sign Language. He first believed Nim was stringing signs into re…

  — Herbert S. Terrace, Laura A. Petitto, Richard J. Sanders, Thomas G. Bever, Can an Ape Create a Sentence?

• Your brain reparses this sentence the moment it realizes it guessed wrong

  Sentences like 'The horse raced past the barn fell' walk readers confidently down one grammatical path, then yank the floor out from under them mid-sentence. Psycholinguist Thomas …

  — Thomas G. Bever, The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures

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