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Noam Chomsky Makes Surprise Visit to UW Linguistic Community
On April 6, 2009, linguist Noam Chomsky was in Madison to deliver talks on US foreign policy—his favored subject of recent years. A group of thirty or so members of the UW community were privileged to a surprise appearance brought about by Dr. Eric Raimy, Assistant Professor of English and Michael H. Coen, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Computer Sciences.
Chomsky arrived at Helen C. White Hall to an attentive crowd who listened to Chomsky reiterate core elements of his syntactic theory that revolutionized the way scholars and reasearchers approach language, language acquisition, and second language research from the 1960’s to the present. Chomsky spoke of the problematic ways in which cognitive scientists presently view language acquisition as a naive computational process. Audience members engaged Chomsky in scholarly parley; yet, the linguistic lion remained steadfastly assured that the ability to learn a first language was a biogenetic inheritance made possible by a structural component within the brain.
Submitted by: Trini Stickle