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语言与进化。 Robert C. Berwick Noam Chomsky 的新著。
We are born crying, but those cries herald the first stirrings of language. German babies’ cries mirror the melody of German speech; French babies mirror French speech—apparently acquired in utero (Mampe et al. 2009). Within the first year or so after birth, infants master the sound system of their language; then, after another few years have passed, they are engaging their caretakers in conversation. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—the “faculty of language”—has long raised important biological questions, including the following: What is the nature of language? How does it function? How has it evolved?