THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT

Steven Pinker

• Johnstone Family Professor in the Psychology department at Harvard University
• Graduated from McGill University and went on to earn his doctorate at Harvard in 1979, finishing a fellowship at MIT and finally settling
• Was the professor and director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at MIT

"In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading scientists of language and the mind, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our car knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our beings by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats,"

COGNITIVE sCIENCE

• A new interdisciplinary field called “cognitive science” combined elements of psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neurobiology in order to study and understand the mind and its processes
• In linguistics, 3 major questions drive the research: 1. To what extent is linguistic knowledge innate or learned? 2. Why is it more difficult for adults to acquire a second-language than it is for infants to acquire their first-language? 3. How are humans able to understand novel sentences?

PRIMARY CLAIM

• The primary claim Pinker is trying to prove is that the ability to develop and use language is not a learned skill but an innate instinct
• He uses the universality of languages as well as many other claims to prove this

ADDITIONAL CLAIMS

• "Mother-ese" and simplified language do not determine a child's linguistic proficiency
• Our perception of speech is an illusion
• There is a specific "language organ" located in a region of the brain that is responsible for language acquisition and speech generation

NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST

• Published multiple theories on grammar and language, including “the logical structure of linguistic theory” in 1975
• Chomsky's work was based on his observation of the gap between the grammar and language skill children display, and the lack of formal education and experience they have received for it (poverty of the stimulus)

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• Chomsky believed that knowledge of basic linguistic principles was innate and that language learning was an unconscious construction utilizing the innate knowledge and cues from our surrounding (Universal Grammar Theory)
• Chomsky's work was the basis for most of Pinker's work in "The Language Instinct"

THEORY OF uNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

• Chomsky observed three amazing feats in regard to all languages: 1. Virtually every sentence that a person says or understands is a brand new combination of words, therefore a language cannot be a predetermined list of sentences. 2. Our brain must have a “program” to make an infinite set of sentences using a finite set of vocabulary; this program can be considered “mental grammar” 3. Children develop an understanding of complex grammar without formal instruction and continue to construct new sentences that they have never encountered

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• Therefore “universal grammar” or a common plan for all languages must exist as an innate feature of the human brain
• “Universal grammar” also implies that all languages have a common characteristic in their grammatical structure These two sentences summarize his theory of universal grammar

CLAIM 1: THE MYTH OF "MOTHER-ESE"

• Pinker’s claim: “basic organization of grammar is wired into a child’s brain.” -Within the first three years, children develop linguistic proficiency so quickly and so accurately without directly being taught how to form language -Karin Stromwald studied 13 preschoolers and their ability to create grammatically correct sentences. She found that the children were over 90% accurate and that the errors they made were not random, but logical. Errors decreased as the child aged, showing the importance of linguistic stimuli.

CLAIM 1: THE MYTH OF "MOTHER-ESE"

• Children do not need “mother-ese” but they do need exposure to language. "In many communities in the world, parents do not indulge their children in mother-ese.” -It is illogical to believe that children catch and memorize every detail of their parent’s language to imitate it. -“Feral children” who grew up in complete isolation were mute, showing the importance of language but not necessarily direct linguistic stimulation like mother-ese

Timeline of early language development

CLAIM 2: SPEECH IS AN ILLUSION

• Pinker’s claim: “When we listen to speech the actual sounds go in one ear and out the other; what we perceive is language...All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of separate words...we simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary” (Pinker, 159)
• “Mcgurk Effect”
• Oronyms- a string of sounds that can be formed into different sentences based on how it is interpreted. “The stuffy nose can lead to problems” can also be read “The stuff he knows can lead to problems”

CLAIM 2: SPEECH IS AN ILLUSION

• The Mcgurk effect and Oronyms shows how speech is a product of what we perceive through our senses. Speech perception is a man-made way of interpreting information and an illusion in the sense that there is more than one way to understand it.

CLAIM 3: THE LANGUAGE ORGAN

• Pinker’s claim: “If there is a language instinct, it has to be embodied somewhere in the brain and, those brain circuits must have been prepared for their role by the genes that built them.” (Pinker, 299)
• “Broca’s Region”- In 1861, Paul Broca studied an aphasic patient and found severe damage to the left region of the brain around the Sylvian fissure. This was confirmed by more aphasic and language-impaired patients and the region is now directly linked to language.

CLAIM 3: THE LANGUAGE ORGAN

• “Wernicke’s Area”- In 1874, Carl Wernicke discovered an area associated with a different type of language impairment. A band of fibers in the same area of Broca’ region, connecting across the Sylvian fissure was designated “Wernicke’s Area”
• These two “organelles” make up Pinker’s “language organ.” The exact purposes are continually being discovered but the region is associated to language and responsible for speech generation and comprehension.

LANGUAGE INSTINCT?

• Universal Grammar- language is exclusively a human ability and all languages are related to each other based on Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar
• Without the existence of a language instinct, there is no explanation for a child’s quick, accurate acquisition of language

LANGUAGE INSTINCT?

• All speech is an illusion that only humans can perceive and understand, therefore a language instinct could explain how all humans can “agree” on how to understand language
• There are biological explanations for our ability to understand language; the existence of a language instinct to direct the language organs is probable

COUNTERARGUMENT

• http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/there-is-no-language-instinct/