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Sounds Like — Chomsky

The book Talking Hands

The New Scientist reports that “Charades reveals a universal sentence structure.”

Susan Golden-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, led a team that found that speakers of most languages use the same simple sentence structure when miming, regardless of the structure of the language they speak. A demonstration movie is here.

That structure is postfix notation — subject, object, verb. For example, mice cheese eat.

One comment on "Sounds Like — Chomsky"

  • Er, I think you mean Goldin-Meadow?
    I don’t see anything actually revealed. The video just shows one guy watching a video of a girl putting on a hat before he charades the same thing.

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