> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Chris Doss<lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Then it occured to me that it is not actually necessary to belong to a
> species that is so "linguistically primed" in order to acquire language,
> although it certainly helps (cf. Koko the gorilla).
>
> I thought one of the observations about Koko etc. was that they don't
> really have a sense of grammar, just vocabulary. That is, they get
> symbols, but not really language.
>
Humans can use their general reasoning capabilities to learn non-Chomskian languages (or if you prefer, non-Chomskian rules for symbolic communication.) So it seems as plausible a just-so story as any.