Help desk, SAT 2

I don’t know how to explain why this answer is right, so if you do, I would really appreciate your leaving a comment. (I had trouble with at least one other, so I’ll try to get that posted as well.)

Thank you !

Autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, Part III

(Part III in a series of posts that will eventually take us to a highly contagious and dangerously inaccurate meme about what autism is.)

Let’s begin here by augmenting the scenario discussed in part II: Imagine yourself going to another country where you don’t know the language and spending several years there seemingly immersed in that language, and that:

1. all your basic needs are taken care, such that you don’t actually need to interact with anyone, and
2. for whatever reason, you mostly choose not to interact with anyone, even passively, such that:
3. even as you hear the syllables coming out of people’s mouths, you manage to hardly ever pay attention to what those who utter these syllables are doing, looking at, or otherwise attending to.

In this situation, I argued, you would learn very little of the spoken language.

Autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, Part II

(Part II in a series of posts that will eventually take us to a highly contagious and dangerously inaccurate meme about what autism is.)

So why is Receptive Joint Attention, as I noted in my last post, so crucial to language learning?

Autism, neurodiversity, and language learning, Part I

Recent events—including the publicity surrounding the movie “Far from the Tree” and a highly contagious and dangerously inaccurate meme about what autism is–have me bursting with things to say about autism and language learning. There’s way too much for one post, and it’s hard to know where to begin.

So I’ll begin where it all begins: Joint Attention.

This is what Joint Attention looks like:

In words: two or more people attending the same thing.

Is “its” on it’s way out?

Here’s another candidate for a rule that will be gone in 20 years: the distinction between “its” and “it’s.” Everywhere, even in published material, the latter seems to be displacing the former.

And what with basal ganglia and contagious speech patterns, we’re probably all subconsciously learning to favor “it’s”. The more often we favor it (it’s), the more often we favor it.

One could even make a grammatical case for this displacement–one that doesn’t invoke the French! Possessive nouns get the apostrophe (“the cat’s pajamas”), so why not possessive pronouns^*?

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*In fact, we already have one pronoun that does get an apostrophe: “one”, as in “one should mind one’s ps and qs.”