It amazes me that anyone would think to, or want to, quantify the differences between a speaker's preferences and a listener's preferences, though I suppose it could serve some purpose. But I don't think we need to know the value of the relative weightings to tell us that language development can come in leaps. All it takes is common sense. Start with the fact that we are a species full of high curiosity, and that we need/want to know everything we can about the world around us. This would have been especially true of
homo erectus--they would have needed to know, for ex., that "grnk" meant, "Run! A lion is chasing me!", not, "Hi, how are you today?" Once they realized how handy language could be, don't you think they would have expanded it as fast as possible? Look at infants: once they grasp the fact that things can be named, and that they can use language, they just take off, linguistically. From using maybe 2 or 3 words at a time, which is typical of 18 months old, they'll most likely be using full sentences by 24 months. Look at Helen Keller: once the memory of wah for water was brought back to her, her desire to learn was insatiable.
About Sept. the 11th., mm, yes, we did have threads on that. Nerves, needless to say, were on edge, and a couple of times the discussions got fairly heated. That was when it was decided that discussing politics, esp. potentially-fraught politics, here, was better not being done.
I too, went back to those threads (not sure I 'preciate being referred to as a ghost, though!
), and noticed something: when I clicked on a link to another AWAD thread here, a new window opened with it. However, in one of those links when I clicked a link to another thread, that one took over the window of the one I'd been looking at, instead of opening up another window. Anybody know why?
