Charles Yang's New Study Reveals That Young Children Understand Grammar but Chimps Don’t

A new study conducted by Charles Yang, Associate Professor of Linguistics in the School of Arts and Sciences and of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has shown that children as young as two understand basic grammar rules when they first learn to speak and are not simply imitating adults. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yang applied the same statistical analysis on data from one of the most famous animal language-acquisition experiments—Project Nim—and showed that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language over the course of many years, never grasped rules like those in a two-year-old’s grammar.

“The idea that children are only imitating adults’ language is very intuitive, so it’s seen a revival over the last few years,” Yang said. “But this is strong statistical evidence in favor of the idea that children actually know a lot about abstract grammar from an early age.”

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