The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
Authors: Steven Pinker
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Do you have a real baby that says googoo gaga?
Just as interestingly, Sarah could not have been simply imitating her parents, memorizing verbs with the -s ’s pre-attached. Sarah some times uttered word forms that she could not possibly have heard from her parents:
When she be’s in the kindergarten…
He’s a boy so he gots a scary one. [costume]
She do’s what her mother tells her.
She must, then, have created these forms herself, using an unconscious version of the English agreement rule. The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?), but sentences like these show clearly that language acquisition cannot be explained as a kind of imitation.
One step remains to complete the argument that language is a specific instinct, not just the clever solution to a problem thought up by a generally brainy species. If language is an instinct, it should have an identifiable seat in the brain, and perhaps even a special set of genes that help wire it into place. Disrupt these genes or neurons, and language should suffer while the other parts of intelligence carry on; spare them in an otherwise damaged brain, and you should have a retarded individual with intact language, a linguistic idiot savant. If, on the other hand, language is just the exercise of human smarts, we might expect that injuries and impairments would make people stupider across the board, including their language. The only pattern we would expect is that the more brain tissue that is damaged, the duller and less articulate the person should be.
No one has yet located a language organ or a grammar gene, but the search is on. There are several kinds of neurological and genetic impairments that compromise language while sparing cognition and vice versa. One of them has been known for over a century, perhaps for millennia. When there is damage to certain circuits in the lower parts of the frontal lobe of the brain’s left hemisphere—say, from a stroke or bullet wound—the person often suffers from a syndrome called Broca’s aphasia. One of these victims, who eventually recovered his language ability, recalls the event, which he experienced with complete lucidity:
When I woke up I had a bit of a headache and thought I must have been sleeping with my right arm under me because it felt all pins-and-needly and numb and I couldn’t make it do what I wanted. I got out of bed but I couldn’t stand; as a matter of fact I actually fell on the floor because my right leg was too weak to take my weight. I called out to my wife in the next room and no sound came—I couldn’t speak…. I was astonished, horrified. I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me and I began to feel bewildered and frightened and then I suddenly realized that I must have had a stroke. In a way this rationalization made me feel somewhat relieved but not for long because I had always thought that the effects of a stroke were permanent in every case…. I found I could speak a little but even to me the words seemed wrong and not what I meant to say.
As this writer noted, most stroke victims are not as lucky. Mr. Ford was a Coast Guard radio operator when he suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-nine. The neuropsychologist Howard Gardner interviewed him three months later. Gardner asked him about his work before he entered the hospital.
“I’m a sig…no…man…uh, well,…again.” These words were emitted slowly, and with great effort. The sounds were not clearly articulated; each syllable was uttered harshly, explosively, in a throaty voice….
“Let me help you,” I interjected. “You were a signal…”
“A sig-nal man…right,” Ford completed my phrase triumphandy.
“Were you in the Coast Guard?”
“No, er, yes, yes…ship…Massachu…chusetts…Coast-guard…years.” He raised his hands twice,
Do you have a real baby that says googoo gaga?
Just as interestingly, Sarah could not have been simply imitating her parents, memorizing verbs with the -s ’s pre-attached. Sarah some times uttered word forms that she could not possibly have heard from her parents:
When she be’s in the kindergarten…
He’s a boy so he gots a scary one. [costume]
She do’s what her mother tells her.
She must, then, have created these forms herself, using an unconscious version of the English agreement rule. The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?), but sentences like these show clearly that language acquisition cannot be explained as a kind of imitation.
One step remains to complete the argument that language is a specific instinct, not just the clever solution to a problem thought up by a generally brainy species. If language is an instinct, it should have an identifiable seat in the brain, and perhaps even a special set of genes that help wire it into place. Disrupt these genes or neurons, and language should suffer while the other parts of intelligence carry on; spare them in an otherwise damaged brain, and you should have a retarded individual with intact language, a linguistic idiot savant. If, on the other hand, language is just the exercise of human smarts, we might expect that injuries and impairments would make people stupider across the board, including their language. The only pattern we would expect is that the more brain tissue that is damaged, the duller and less articulate the person should be.
No one has yet located a language organ or a grammar gene, but the search is on. There are several kinds of neurological and genetic impairments that compromise language while sparing cognition and vice versa. One of them has been known for over a century, perhaps for millennia. When there is damage to certain circuits in the lower parts of the frontal lobe of the brain’s left hemisphere—say, from a stroke or bullet wound—the person often suffers from a syndrome called Broca’s aphasia. One of these victims, who eventually recovered his language ability, recalls the event, which he experienced with complete lucidity:
When I woke up I had a bit of a headache and thought I must have been sleeping with my right arm under me because it felt all pins-and-needly and numb and I couldn’t make it do what I wanted. I got out of bed but I couldn’t stand; as a matter of fact I actually fell on the floor because my right leg was too weak to take my weight. I called out to my wife in the next room and no sound came—I couldn’t speak…. I was astonished, horrified. I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me and I began to feel bewildered and frightened and then I suddenly realized that I must have had a stroke. In a way this rationalization made me feel somewhat relieved but not for long because I had always thought that the effects of a stroke were permanent in every case…. I found I could speak a little but even to me the words seemed wrong and not what I meant to say.
As this writer noted, most stroke victims are not as lucky. Mr. Ford was a Coast Guard radio operator when he suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-nine. The neuropsychologist Howard Gardner interviewed him three months later. Gardner asked him about his work before he entered the hospital.
“I’m a sig…no…man…uh, well,…again.” These words were emitted slowly, and with great effort. The sounds were not clearly articulated; each syllable was uttered harshly, explosively, in a throaty voice….
“Let me help you,” I interjected. “You were a signal…”
“A sig-nal man…right,” Ford completed my phrase triumphandy.
“Were you in the Coast Guard?”
“No, er, yes, yes…ship…Massachu…chusetts…Coast-guard…years.” He raised his hands twice,
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