Words - Radiolab

We've been talking about language development at university (I'm training to be a primary school teacher) and I thought of this podcast I'd listened to a while ago and found really interesting.

There are a whole bunch of interesting things they discuss to do with the relationship between language and thinking. A woman recounts meeting a deaf man with no language, some experiments that show that perhaps without language you simply can't imagine some concepts, there's some brief word chemistry by Shakespeare, a neuroanatomist describes her own stroke, and a really fascinating story of some deaf children with no language inventing their own sign language whilst at school, and some implications that followed.

Anyway, simply fascinating, well worth listening to. 1 hour long.

Words

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that.

We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.

"The limits of my language are the limits of my life."

Ludwig Wittgenstein