Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.

. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars.[1] He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."[2Born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. He had two siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewistall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyedhad trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War.[3] In late 1902 Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance by Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. He entered Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.[4]

Marriage and family[edit]

In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887-1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis (19171944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Wells Lewis was killed in action while serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, specifically during the rescue of 'The Lost Battalion' in the Foret-De-Champ, near Germany, in France.[citation needed] Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and observed that Sinclair's literary "success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for Lewis's work" and the family moved out of town.[5] Lewis divorced Grace in 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist. Later in 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont.[6] They had a son, Michael Lewis, in 1930. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they divorced in 1942. Michael Lewis became an actor, also suffered with alcoholism, and died in 1975 of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Michael had two sons, John

Paul and Gregiry Claude, with wife Bernadette Nanse and a daughter Lesley with wife Valerie Cardew.

Nobel Prize[edit]
In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of usnot readers alone, but even writersare still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today." He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."[15]

Novels[edit]
The works of Sinclair Lewis are listed in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2004. Serialized magazine printings of Lewis's novels are listed online at The FictionMags Index.[20]

1912: Hike and the Aeroplane (juvenile, as Tom Graham) 1914: Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man 1915: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life 1917: The Job: An American Novel 1917: The Innocents: A Story for Lovers 1919: Free Air Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, June 7, June 14 and June 21, 1919 1920: Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott 1922: Babbitt Excerpted in Hearst's International, October 1922 1925: Arrowsmith 1926: Mantrap Serialized in Collier's, February 20, March 20 and April 24, 1926 1927: Elmer Gantry 1928: The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen 1929: Dodsworth 1933: Ann Vickers

Washoe (c. September 1965 October 30, 2007) was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language, as part of a research experiment on animal language acquisition.[1] Washoe learned approximately 350 words of ASL.[2] She also taught her adopted son Loulis some American Sign Language.[3][4][5] Using similar teaching methods, several other chimpanzees were later taught 150 or more signs, which they were able to combine to form complex messages.[citation needed]

Teaching method
Washoe was raised in an environment as close as possible to that of a human child, in an attempt to satisfy her psychological need for companionship.[13][14][15] While with Washoe, the Gardners and Fouts were careful to communicate only in ASL with Washoe, rather than using vocal communication, on the assumption that this would create a less confusing learning environment for Washoe. This technique is commonly used when teaching human children how to sign.[16] After the first couple of years of the language project, the Gardners and Roger Fouts discovered that Washoe could pick up ASL gestures without direct instruction, but instead by observing humans around her who were signing amongst themselves. For example, the scientists signed "Toothbrush" to each other while they brushed their teeth near her. At the time of observation, Washoe showed no signs of having learned the sign, but on a later occasion she reacted to the sight of a toothbrush by spontaneously producing the correct sign, thereby showing that she had in fact previously learned the ASL sign. Moreover, the Gardners began to realize that rewarding particular signs with food and tickles was actually interfering with the intended result of conversational sign language. They changed their strategy so that food and meal times were never juxtaposed with instruction times.

Nim Chimpsky
Linguistic critics challenged the animal trainers to demonstrate that Washoe was actually using language and not symbols. The null hypothesis was that the Gardners were using conditioning to teach the chimpanzee to use hand formations in certain contexts to create desirable outcomes, and that they had not learned the same linguistic rules that humans innately learn. In response to this challenge, the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky was taught to communicate using sign language in studies led by Herbert S. Terrace. In 44 months, Nim Chimpsky learned 125 signs.[17] However, linguistic analysis of Nim's communications demonstrated that Nim's use was symbolic, and lacked grammar, or rules, of the kind that humans use in communicating via language. This constitutes a chimpanzee vocabulary learning rate of roughly 0.1 words per day. This rate is not comparable to the average college-educated English-speaking human who learns roughly 14 words per day between ages 2 and 22.[18]

Kanzi
Kanzi, a Bonobo, is believed to understand more human language than any other nonhuman animal in the world. Kanzi apparently learned by eavesdropping on the keyboard lessons researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was giving to his adoptive mother. Kanzi learned to communicate with a Lexigram board, pushing symbols that stand for words. The board is wired to a computer, so the word is then vocalized out loud by the computer. This helps Kanzi develop his vocabulary and enables him to communicate with researchers. One day, Rumbaugh used the computer to say to Kanzi, "Can you make the dog bite the snake?" It is believed Kanzi had never heard this sentence before. In answering the question, Kanzi searched among the objects present until he found a toy dog and a toy snake, put the snake in the dog's mouth, and used his thumb and finger to close the dog's mouth over the snake. In 2001, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, writing in the Financial Times, observed that Kanzi was "asked by an invisible interrogator through head-phones (to avoid cueing) to identify 35 different items in 180 trials. His success rate was 93 per cent."[23] In further testing, beginning when he was 7 years old, Kanzi was asked 416 complex questions, responding correctly over 74% of the time. Kanzi has been observed verbalizing a meaningful noun to his sister.[24]

Koko (born July 4, 1971) is a female gorilla who, according to Francine "Penny" Patterson, her long-term trainer, is able to understand more than 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language,[2] and understand approximately 2,000 words of spoken English.[3] As with other ape language experiments, the degree to which Koko masters these signs has been controversial, as has been the degree to which such mastery demonstrates language abilities. Koko was born at San Francisco Zoo and has lived most of her life in Woodside, California, although a move to a sanctuary on Maui, Hawaii, has been planned since the 1990s. In December of that same year, All Ball escaped from Koko's cage and was hit and killed by a car. Later, Patterson said that when she signed to Koko that All Ball had gone, Koko signed "Bad, sad, bad" and "Frown, cry, frown, sad". Patterson also reported later hearing Koko making a sound similar to human weeping.[16] In 1985, Koko was allowed to pick out two new kittens from a litter to be her companions. The animals she chose, later named "Lipstick" and "Smokey", were also Manxes like All Ball.[17 Lana (born on October 7, 1970) is a female chimpanzee, the first to be used in language research using lexigrams. She was born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, and the project she was allocated to when 1 year old, the LANguage

Analogue project led by Duane Rumbaugh, was named after her with the acronym LANA because the project team felt that her The first LANA project (1971) officially had two Principal Investigators, Rumbaugh and Ernst von Glasersfeld (cf. NIH grants HD-06016 and RR-00165). Ernst von Glasersfeld developed the language that Lana learned to use: he coined the term "lexigram", created the first 120 of them and designed the grammar that regulated their combination. This artificial language was called Yerkish, in honor of Robert M. Yerkes, the founder of the laboratory within which the LANA project was conceived and conducted. The early project also had several graduate student researchers. The prime researcher, and the prime worker with Lana was Dr. Timothy V. Gill. Included in the project were graduate sBody language is defined as non-verbal communication (Nonverbal communication describes the
process of conveying meaning in the form of non-word messages. Research shows that the majority of our communication is non verbal, also known as body language. - wikipedia) Body language is processed by the eyes. Verbal language AKA Oral communication (Oral communication, while primarily referring to spoken verbal communication, can also employ visual aids and non-verbal elements to support the conveyance of meaning -wikipedia) Verbal language is processed by the eyes. There is also tactile language, AKA braille which is processed by the skin. So as you can see, there are many kinds of languages that are processed by different parts of the human body and depending of what part process the language, it gets different names, tactile language (skin) verbal languagetudents Gwen Bell Dooley, Beverly Wilkenson, A identity was well woA sign language (also signed language or simply signing) is a language which uses manual communication and body language to convey meaning, as opposed to acoustically conveyed sound patterns. This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. They share many similarities with spoken languages (sometimes called "oral languages", which depend primarily on sound), which is why linguists consider both to be natural languages, but there are also some significant differences between signed and spoken languages.rth preserving Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance, the way the language system is used in communication. The concept was first introduced by Noam Chomsky[1] as part of the foundations for his Generative Grammar, but it has since been adopted and developed by other linguists, particularly those working in the generativist tradition. In the generativist tradition competence is the only level of language that is studied, because this level gives insights into the Universal Grammar, that generativists see as underlying all human language systems. Functional theories of grammar tend to dismiss the sharp distinction between competence and performance, and particularly the primacy given to the study of competence.

In linguistics, performance has two senses:[1] (1) A technique used in phonetics whereby aspiring practitioners of the subject are trained to control the use of their vocal organs (2) A term used in the linguistic theory of transformational generative grammar, referring to language being seen as a set of specific utterances produced by native speakers It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to language production (parole), with an emphasis upon how this is different from competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself. Linguistic performance does not simply reflect the intrinsic sound-meaning connections established by the system of linguistic rules. It involves many other factors, such as extra-linguistic beliefs concerning the speaker and the situation; these play a fundamental role in determining how speech is produced, identified and understood. Furthermore, it is governed by principles of cognitive structure such as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) that are technically not considered to be aspects of language.[2]