How Language Began | The Story of Language | Episode 6

09/01/20 • 75 min

Welcome to The Story of Language: an original podcast series about language, linguistics, cognition, and culture. In this episode we talk about how language began, including language evolution vs language change, how animal and human communication are similar and different, and the evidence for why language is probably millions of years old, not thousands.

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How language works (with Ted Gibson)

Recently I had the pleasure of talking to Ted Gibson from his eponymous TedLab at MIT which researches why human languages are the way they are, how people learn and process language, and the relationship between language and culture. In this interview we talk about his work with numbers, colours, word order, and information theory across various languages and his search for simplicity in explaining the complexity of language.

Next Episode

Construction grammar and language learning (with Remi van Trijp)

Recently I had the pleasure of talking to Remi van Trijp, head of the Language Research Unit and the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, and one of the main developers of Fluid Construction Grammar. His team is trying to answer some of the most profound questions in linguistics by combining techniques from computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and robotics. It’s complicated and very technical work, but as you’ll see in this interview Remi has an incredible ability to explain complex things in an easy-to-understand way.