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In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has undertaken the daunting task of informing lay audiences about forty years of progress in the study of the psychology of language. Toward this goal, he offers a striking array of incisive, revealing examples and insights about the distinct character of human language. These examples serve more than to inform and amuse us about language: They are interwoven to create Pinker's thesis about one of the oldest themes of modern psycholinguistics: namely, that human beings are uniquely equipped, by virtue of their genetic endowment, to use language. This capacity is Pinker's "language instinct."
In the original explorations of this position, Noam Chomsky and others emphasized that the young child's acquisition of language can be better understood as a relatively modest act of "tuning" imposed upon a fundamental predisposition to acquire language than as a Herculean logical feat of deducing the grammar of one's native tongue from what amounts to inadequate data. Pinker invokes evidence concerning language acquisition, but goes further to augment these findings with analyses from other realms. The more readily anticipated of these include normal and abnormal brain function, the universal features that relate all human languages, and the problem of linguistic relativity. Less expected is Pinker's emphasis on the role of evolution in the emergence of human language in its present form.
The analyses in each of these domains are organized, engaging, and persuasive. With regard to language acquisition, for example, the language skills of the infant are characterized as being evident almost from birth. At age one month, babies react more to a switch from the repetitive "ba ba ba" to "pa pa pa" than to a switch of equal physical magnitude between two sounds which fall, from the adult's perspective, in the "ba" range. The infant's articulation is delayed for several months, during which time the larynx descends deeper into the throat and brain development proceeds. Later, words are identified either when they appear in isolation, or from stressed final syllables in the otherwise unintelligible stream of speech. This strategy is exposed by occasional errors of the form, "Adult: Behave! Child: I am heyv." During the "All Hell Breaks Loose" phase of language development, the child's speech reflects every manner of grammatical rule. General...