Psychology - Gardner and Gardner - Aims and Context

Aims and Context 

• This is a question that challenges scientific and religious beliefs. 'To what extent are humans qualitatively different form all other animals?'
• It has benn suggested that one crucial difference that dstinguists humans from animals is that we have language.
• A number of researchers have tried to demonstarte that, in fact, some animals can acquire human language, which would challenge this distinction.
• Noam Chomsky (1957) argued that humans have a special part of their brain (the 'language acquisition device or LAD) that means that we are biologically 'programmed' to acquire language. This explains why human cultures all over the world have language, no matter how primitive they are, and why children acquire it so rapidly and naturally.
• According to this view, other animals should not be able toacquire language.
• In their six years of working with Vivki, she was only able to make four sounds that apporoximated to…