Dr. Eve V. Clark has spent a career in academia pursuing one seemingly simple question: How do children learn to talk? The theory in vogue at the beginning of her career was advanced by Noam Chomsky, whose theory of Universal Grammar was all the rage amongst linguists. As a woman outnumbered by men, Eve pursued her research doggedly, from Edinburgh where she made her first recordings, to Bing Nursery School at Stanford, where she solidified her findings. She also drew on her experiences as a mother, documenting her son’s speech in over a thousand pages as he learned to speak. In the end, she had to admit that Chomsky was wrong: language is largely taught to children by adults around them, though not in the ways that adults presumed.
In this conversation, we talk about the difficulties of being a ground-breaking woman in academia, the progression of her research, and the conclusions she came to. We bring it up to the modern day, a time when the academic environment where she has spent her career are under attack by an administration hostile to painstaking documentation of the facts before us.
Visit the Babblery for transcript and links to more information.
About The Babblery:
The Babblery features conversations about who we are and how we got this way. Modern humans can seem like the ancients building the Biblical Tower of Babel, cursed by God/nature never to understand each other. As Visiting Translators at the Tower of Babble, our guests delve into their work, their research, and their own experiences to try to explain the bits they’ve learned about Earth’s most perplexing species. Though we all speak different languages, here at The Babblery we aim to promote understanding, one conversation at a time. Visit The Babblery at https://babblery.com/. The Babblery is produced by Suki Wessling with support from KSQD.
