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The problematic transition from specific competences to general competence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2003

James R. Hurford
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK [email protected] http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim/ [email protected]
Jean-Louis Dessalles
Affiliation:
Groupe : Information, Interaction, Intelligence : I3 Ecole Normale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, France http://www.enst.fr/~jld

Abstract

Postulating a variety of mutually isolated thought domains for prelinguistic creatures is both unparsimonious and implausible, requiring unexplained parallel evolution of each separate module. Furthermore, the proposal that domain-general concepts are not accessible without prior exposure to phonetically realized human language utterances cannot be implemented by any concept-acquisition mechanism.

Type
Brief Report
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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