by Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker's classic book, The
Language Instinct, helped decipher some complex theories of modern
day linguists. He presents his case for an inherent ability to learn
and communicate language, as the book title indicates. He provides
much evidence, including the passage below:
When engineers first tried to
develop reading machines for the blind in the 1940s, they devised a
set of noises that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet. Even
with heroic training, people could not recognize the sounds at a rate
faster than good Morse code operators, about three units a second.
Real speech, somehow, is perceived an order of magnitude faster; ten
to fifteen phonemes per second for casual speech, twenty to thirty
per second for the man in the late-night Veg-O-Matic, and as many as
forty to fifty per second for artificially sped-up speech. Given how
the human auditory system works, this is almost unbelievable. When a
sound like a click is repeated at the rate of twenty times a second
or faster, we no longer hear it as a sequence of separate sounds but
as a low buzz. If we can hear forty-five phonemes per second, the
phonemes can not possibly be consecutive bits of sound; each moment
of sound must have several phonemes packed into it that our brains
somehow unpack. As a result, speech is by far the fastest way of
getting information into the head through the ear.
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