-
348 BCE
Plato
Plato's theory of concepts :
"man", is not merely an idea in the mind but something which has a reality of its own, outside and independent of the mind -
322 BCE
Aristotle
Theory of the language and meaning -
397
St. Agustine
The "Confessions" of St. Agustine the Hippo are considered as intuitive philosophy on memory and language. -
Herder
The language came from imitation, feelings & imagination. It is a set of poetic elements. -
Rousseau
A language emerges from the passion. -
Kempelen & speaking machine
Kempelen is famous for the book "Mechanism of human speech" where he provided the first detailed theory of speech sound formation in the human vocal tract. He sides with Herder and writes about the universal usability of gestures (when there's no shared language). -
Broca's patient Tan
Broca published a report of a case of aphasia associated with a lesion in the left frontal lobe that at the time he called aphemia.
The patient was a 51 year-old man with a previous history of aphasia that became known as “Tan”
because of the expressive aphasia he suffered from, as a
result of which he could only keep repeating “Tan tan”. -
Wundt & structuralists
By conducting the first psychological experiments in his laboratory in Leipzig, W. Wundt officialy became the establisher of psychology as a scientific study of mind and behavior. -
Franz Boas
Boas introduced us to the cultural relativity hypothesis by delivering a study of the eskimo language. -
Sapir&Whorf, Relativity
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. Linguistic relativity stands in close relation to semiotic-level concerns with the general relation of language and thought, and to discourse-level concerns with how patterns of language use in cultural context can affect thought. -
Miller
His book "Language and Communication" is considered seminal in the field. Together with Noam Chomsky he published papers on the mathematical and computational aspects of language and its syntax, two new areas of study.Miller also studied the human understanding of words and sentences, a problem also faced by artificial speech-recognition technology. -
Behaviorism - Skinner
Verbal behavior is shaped and sustained by a verbal environment— by people who respond to behavior in certain ways because of the practices of the group of which they are members. These practices and the resulting interaction of speaker and listener yield the phenomena which are considered here under the rubric of verbal behavior. -
Chomsky's UG
Universal Grammar was a nativist approach to linguistic development.
UG consists of a set of atomic grammatical categories and relations that are the building blocks of the particular grammars of all human
