How do you know how to speak?

Because, when you were a baby your mum, dad and rest of the family talked to you. They taught you how to speak by repeating such helpful phrases as ‘Look at the doggie! Where is the doggie? Doggie is over there.’ You also overheard adult conversations and that also helped you learn – especially more advanced things like grammar. Right?

Not according to this book.

Like birds are born with the instincts required to learn how to fly – humans are born with the instinct to learn how to communicate through language. Pinker assembles a huge amount of evidence from researchers world-wide to prove that language is a human instinct. He shows that many different languages, though they appear very different on the surface, do in fact apply very similar rules. This does point towards the possibility that humans are born with a set of grammar rules. The child then hears what adults say and rather than copying it – co-creates the language whilst learning.

One example is the addition of ‘s’ at the end of a verb in certain cases: He walks, she eats, it costs.

In order to apply the ‘s’ correctly the child has to identify whether:

• the subject is in third person or not (he walks versus I walk)
• the subject is singular or plural (he walks versus they walk)
• the action is present tense (he walks versus he walked)
• the action is habitual or going on at the moment of speaking (he walks vs he is walking)

That is quite a lot of grammatical analysis and yet most three to four year olds apply the rule correctly 90% of the time. Now, one could say they are just imitating their parents – but children do apply the rule also in sentences that they cannot have heard any adults saying like “when she be’s in kindergarten” and “she do’s what her mother tells her”.

Pinker also shows that thought comes before word, that we humans have a type of ‘mentalese’ a language of thought that comes before we put words in order. Otherwise how could it be that sometimes we speak and then think ‘that is not quite what I am trying to say’.

This means what people say is not necessarily what they think – it is merely a translation.

Interesting.