Past Shows

Universal Grammar
aired Saturday June 23 and Monday June 25, 2007

Listen to the episode using RealPlayer.
n.b. most music and sound effects have been removed from this audio file.

Russell finds out about an idea that changed the way people think about language. And he talks to a linguist who believes those ideas should change all over again, because of a tribe in the Amazonian jungle.

20-month-old Emily displays her promising abilities in the field of acquiring a human language. (Emily is a human baby.)

The in-house word nerd displays his embarrassing inability to understand the work of Noam Chomsky, but receives help from linguistics students at the University of Toronto.

Dan Everett returns from jungle life with news of a bizarre language spoken by the Piraha tribe in Brazil. He says it undermines the basis of Chomsky's theory of 'Universal Grammar'.

Chomsky's colleague David Pesetsky says the Piraha language does nothing of the sort, and is not all that bizarre.

Martha McGinnis, a linguist at the University of Calgary, explains why she thinks it's important to figure out what all human languages share.

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