Question

Define the following key terms in your own words. A good definition consists of minimally two things:definition & examples (from the book "the language Instinct by Steven Pinker and/or your own). Sometimes, instead of examples, background information might be more appropriate. For people's names, describe briefly who they are and why they are included in the discussion.

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax:

Ildefonso (A Man without Words):

Infants' understanding of numbers:

Vervet monkeys' kinship recognition:

Creative people thinking in mental images:

Turing machine:

deixis:

synonymy:

Answer 1

1. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax: Franz Boas was a German-American Anthropologist. As per him, as English language uses different and distinct words for different forms of water (for example, liquid, river, rain, brook, wave, etc), which all just mean "water". In a similar way, Eskimos use different words to define different forms of snow(for example, aput which means snow on theground, and qana which means falling snow.) His point is simply that English defines snow by just one word, but it could have been the other way, it could define snow just like it defines different forms of water.

2. Ildefonso (A Man without Words): Susan Schaller is a writer, public speaker and human rights advocate located in Berkeley, California. She began to study American Sign Language. That is when she met Ildefonso. After communicating with him, she realised that Ildefonso did not consider her sign language as communication, but as command. He tried to imitate her, to derive value out of it. Bellugi told Schaller that she had concern whether Ildefonso could learn language at his present age (because language is only properly mastered in youth). However, she continued teachimh. Although he was a slow learner, he learnt basic arithmatic, and the color green invoked strong feelings in Ildefonso.

3. Infants' understanding of numbers: Babies who are good at telling the difference between large and small groups of items even before learning how to count are more likely to do better with numbers in the future, according to new research from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. As per a new study, children do posess the ability percieve arithmatic operations and symbolic languages. "When children are acquiring the symbolic system for representing numbers and learning about math in school, they're tapping into this primitive number sense," says Elizabeth Brannon, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience, who led the study. "It's the conceptual building block upon which mathematical ability is built."

4. Vervet monkeys' kinship recognition: Vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) are more likely to threaten an individual if they have been previoulsy been involved with the individual's kin. Thus they are able to recognize individuals who are constantly in contact with each other. Vervets over the age of 3 years are also more likely to threaten if that individual's close kin and their own close kin have previously been involved in a fight.