"Chimps. Bonobos. Humans. We're all great apes. This hour we take a look at what happens when we all try to live together. Is this idea utterly stupid? Or might it be our one last hope as more and more humans fill up the planet?
"Discussion questions: What are the benefits of this research to psychology? What ethical questions does this research raise?
"This program outlines the development of language in children. It highlights linguist Noam Chomsky's theories about the human brain's predisposition to understand language, and then profiles three scientists working on aspects of psycholinguistics."
TED Talk: "Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of 'social technology' that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation."
"Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world."
Deb Roy: "MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn."
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: "Savage-Rumbaugh's work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology -- and how much by cultural exposure."
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