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The Innovation Show

The Language Game - Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen

The story of language is the story of humanity; the new understanding of language that our guests outline in this book radically revises our conception of ourselves.

In today’s book, our guests outline a revolutionary perspective that overhauls almost everything we thought we knew about language. We will hear how the game of charades reveals deep insights into how language works. We’ll hear how our brain can improvise linguistic ‘moves’ at an astonishingly rapid rate. We’ll hear how languages are in continual flux, how people without a common tongue can rapidly create a language from scratch, and why it’s likely that language has been independently reinvented countless times. We will realise how the creation of language is not only important in itself – it also changed the nature of evolution.

It’s a pleasure to welcome the authors of The Language Game- How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World., Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen

Find Nick here: https://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/nick-chater/ https://twitter.com/nickjchater Find Morten here: https://csl-lab.psych.cornell.edu https://twitter.com/mh_christiansen

Broadcast on:
11 Jan 2023