Innate language Puns

We can very intuitively pick out what makes up a single word in our language ... or at least most of the time. Highschool is one word but ice cream isn't, even though the stress pattern is the same and they're both compound nouns. This can be hard to predict and I second guess myself (of course this is anecdotal but it makes me wonder).

So, is it writing that makes a word a word? Can illiterate people discern what a single word is as easily?

languages with different levels of synthesis have vastly different boundaries for where words begin. Polysynthetic languages count whole sentences at words, but do they? Why couldn't 'inuktitusunguvit' ('do you speak inuktitut', probably spelling it wrong) be spelled 'inuktitu su ngu viit'? the typical answer is that the individual parts it the word change from the roots, but in what way is this different from inflection? su could be described as a form of 'suuq' depending where it occurs in an utterance. (in the above word/ sentence suuq becomes su in that context, disclaimer: I don't speak inuktitut) Why is suuq becoming su grounds for it not being a word because of its dependency on surrounding sounds, why not the indefinite a/an in english?

I suppose what makes a word a word is the underlying stress patterns, but Is this universally recognized? Why would the concept of a single word as we know it mean anything to an illiterate speaker of a polysynthetic language? Wouldn't they be more likely to understand their language in terms of the individual roots?

How much research has been conducted on how language itself is perceived by speakers of very different languages, as well as illiterate people and people of varying socioeconomic status?

It wouldn't surprise me if many languages had no word for 'word', and what we've translated into english and the modern written world was something different.

I could be wrong though. Does anyone know much about all this?

Current humans have evolved to develop language skills. If you take a group of 20 humans, isolate them, they will eventually develop a rudimentary language to communicate with each other. A different group of 20 humans will develop a different language that could be completely different than the first group.

Here's why I'm mentioning humans: Blink Dogs.

They have an intelligence of 10 and their own language called "Blink Dog." Let's say you take a blink dog puppy and keep it away from other Blink Dogs. Would it still be able to "speak" Blink Dog? This is realm specific, but what about in the Forgotten Realms?

What would it mean for a society of people (Dragonborn, Elves, Dwarves, etc.,) that are born already knowing the basic concept of a particular language? Like, what if a group of Dragonborn left in isolation would always create the Draconic language if given enough time?

A comment I used to hear a lot is that in order to build AI, people will need to hard-code a large number of highly specialized modules, and wire them together, just like in the brain -- a module for face recognition, a module for language, a module for imitation learning, and so on. There is lots of experimental evidence for this, based on looking at how babies respond to faces, say, or based on looking at how the brain lights up in FMRI when viewing faces. Babies seem to be too young to have learned face-looking, and the eerie similarity in FMRI patterns across subjects speaks to the existence of a “face module” that is innate, and not learned.

But are these really innate? And what if a brain is missing a few of these capabilities, might the person still be mostly normal? -- And, therefore, could AI be built with a much smaller number of components that currently seem necessary?

In the past couple of years, there has been evidence calling some of the above experimental findings into question. For example, a recent Harvard experiment with primates suggests that learning is necessary for the development of face-looking:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/whats-in-a-face-if-monkeys-dont-see-them-as-babies-they-dont-know/

> The results, write Arcaro and his colleagues, suggest that “face looking by infants is not innate.” A simpler explanation, they suggest, is that newborns have something much more basic in their brains: a perceptual bias for a particular set of shapes and a bias to look at moving things. Put those biases in an environment with a lot of faces, and face recognition emerges.

Recent evidence uncovered in a study at Stanford indicates that grammar is learned (not to be confused with Chomsky's notion of a "Universal Grammar"), not innate:

http://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/22/new-research-toddlers-grammar-skills-learned-not-innate/

There are other studies showing that certain statistical regularities in the structure of language have simple explanations, where previously the regularities were thought to be a sign of particular innate structures. There still might be subtle biases that improve grammar learning (with heavy emphasis on the word “subtle”).

The claim that imitation is largely an innate ability, turned out not to replicate in a Reproducibility Project experiment:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/05/20/a-classic-finding-about-newborn-babies-imitation-skills-is-probably-wrong/

This was a complete shock, and th

Some categories defined linguistically (like Hispanics) or religiously ( Muslims, Jews) become treated like "races" in the US in mass media, even though they are defined by things that are socialized and not inherited (you can convert away from religion, lose or gain a language) and are not the same as races in the sense of people born with a physical feature (eg. blonde hair, dark skin etc.).

What accounts for people wanting to racialize communities that are defined not by physical appearance but other, cultural features, resulting in people perceiving the group to be defined by physical appearance first, rather than culture? Is there a sociological or psychological reason why people have this tendency?

By innate I mean the possibility that their brains are wired to begin to learn how to use their mouths and make noises in order to communicate?

This was an academic article from a linguistics or neuroscience journal (I think) assigned by a philosophy of mind professor around 2006. It described what the author(s) said was a set of words innate to human cognition, from which early languages stemmed. The author likened it not to language but rather to a complex set of calls, similar to those of chimpanzees, and theorized that modern humans have some remnants of this inborn train.

All I can remember is that:

-It was believed that there were about 200 of these 'words'.

-The proto-word 'tal' meant 'tooth'

I can't find a damn thing on Google. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

In my understanding, the reason feral children cannot speak is that, even though language is considered innate in the UG theory, they passed the critical period for learning language without any language input and therefore cannot learn to speak as adults.

I want to know if there are any other human innate abilities that require this kind of input at a young age to develop or that also have critical periods?

My professor wasn't sure, so I turn to you guys.