[lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 11 12:50:49 PDT 2009


At 12:34 PM 6/11/2009, Michael Smith wrote:


>Put a different way, how does the kid figure that some of what
>he's hearing is grammatical and some is not, and which is which?
>
>It seems quite unlikely that a statistical approach could do it
>-- that would involve a combinatorial explosion, surely.

And how would you do it with two or more languages? How do Poto and Cabengo fit into all this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poto_and_Cabengo

Poto and Cabengo are a pair of identical twin girls (real names Grace and Virginia Kennedy, respectively), who used a secret language up to the age of about 8. Poto and Cabengo is also the name of a documentary film about the girls made by Jean-Pierre Gorin and released in 1979.

They were apparently of normal intelligence; they developed their own communication because they had little exposure to spoken language in their early years.

[...]



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