The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker – Book Summary

The book attempts at an integrated analysis of the phenomenon of language; that is, not the literary elements of a language, but the structure of the linguistic system as a whole.

Language is seen as a complex and specialized skill. It develops spontaneously without instructions. That is to say, language is seen more like instinct than an externally developed process. The book supports the theory that language is innate and that humans have a common universal grammar.

 

Foreword: The Nature Of Language

Is language an instinctive characteristic of the human species? This is precisely what this book aims to answer. The language instinct, like others, is a consequence of natural selection, and that our species had a tremendous selecting advantage is just because we could so widely and easily communicate information that enhanced our survival.

This book teaches you:

1. How language is innate and how humans have a natural drive toward linguistic complexity.
2. About the process of registering sound and comprehension
3. The relationship between language and thought
4. Understand if machines can replace a human speech system
5. Know how relevant grammar is in terms of communication.

 

1- Language Is An Instinct, Not Something Physical

Man has researched various questions on language like how language functions or how children learn it, how language evolves, how the brain computes it and answered to a large extent. But the answer to the question of why humans are the only species who use language and do so incredibly efficiently remains a little blurry. One may assume that it is because we have a language instinct that allows us to hold a firm grasp over communication.

A group of theoreticians believes that languages are cultural inventions, specific to the human species. This has been a widely accepted view but requires questioning. Linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the moral superiority of the empiricist view of the mind is far from clear. The study of the mind through evolutionary theory is inconsistent. There is a belief saying that there exists a profound cognitive difference between human groups. Besides, the function that is found in humans is also found in song learning birds.

All infants come into this world with linguistic skills, one of which is phonological skills. Newborn babies can distinguish the prosody of their mother’s language from others. Examining children from different sections of society has proved that language is a natural instinct rather than a cultural invention. We use it to meet our needs to communicate.

 

2- How Does Brain Treat Listening?

Our brain is capable to hear certain noises. Human brains can handle phonological processes that no speech synthesizer can catch at this time. The human brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech and can yet make sense of it. It can flip between hearing something as a bleep and hearing it as a word. Because phonetic perception is like a sixth sense.

The ear is a narrow informational bottleneck lacking other visual supports. We can hear forty-five phonemes per second. The presentation of phonemes is not in a conspicuous sequence. Our brain has to somehow unpack and decipher the information from what enters the ear. Engineers have been working on speech synthesizers for more than 45 years. For a computer to understand a person, one has to train the system to work with that specific individual very extensively. It is an impressive product but is no match for even a mediocre stenographer.

Human comprehension ordinarily takes place in real-time. Listeners keep up with talkers; the lag between the speaker’s mouth and listener’s mind is remarkably short; about a syllable or two, around half a second. Sometimes the senses of hearing and phonetics compete over which gets to interpret a sound. Sometimes the two senses simultaneously interpret a single sound. Sentences are built of words; words are built out of morphemes, which, in turn, are built out of phonemes. Phonemes connect outward to speech, not inward to mentalese; a phoneme corresponds to an act of making a sound. When developing our language, we must understand where language begins within our bodies. Breathing, exhaling, vocal folds all help in speech formation.

 

3- A Child Learns Language Faster Than An Adult

Organs that aid language and language itself evolved because those of our ancestors who could communicate vocally were more likely to survive more than those who couldn’t. Language is a mystery. It takes several years to master one language. How is it then that a child can learn it in about two years? Children learn from observing adults and have no way of separating right from wrong, they don’t study language, they just observe them, yet they still apply the right rule at the right time.

In a more recent study, children were able to move words around to form questions they had never seen before. They are not imitators but rather innovators. It is a common misconception that having parental guidance when a child is learning to speak is crucial. Since language is instinctual, children will learn how to speak when they are ready, and having a parent interject will be of little value to the child.

 

4- Grammar Serves No Role In Communication

The basis of all languages is the same two principles:

1. The arbitrariness of the sign.
2. The form that words take does not have a direct relation to their meaning.

Every language constitutes of words that man denotes by certain sounds and carries a specific meaning. The sign refers to the cognitive unit that comes into existence as a result of the utterance of a sound and meaning that creates in our mind. This meaning does not necessarily have a direct relation to the sound of the word. Hence, while communicating, it is not the strict rules of grammar that matter, but the communication of the sign.

English is steadily decaying because of its prescriptive grammar rules. Instinct relates to descriptive rules and how people naturally talk. There is a widespread belief that black Americans speak grammatically incorrect English. But close scrutiny reveals that black English vernacular and standard American English just use different words to put together sentences. Thus, they are not really speaking incorrect English but rather they are speaking their own language. This language is known as Creole.

 

5- Can Machines Decode Complex Languages As Human Brain Does?

Top-down theory suggests that the knowledge we have helps us to perceive what someone will say to us next. Our brain tries to understand the acoustics coming out of people’s mouths, we retain the information, and then we attach meaning.

No two people’s voices are alike. In rapid speech, many phonemes get swallowed outright. Each phoneme gets the effect of the phonemes that come before and after. When we look at our writing system today we can see how the origins of our language have influenced the writing we use today.

Speech perception is a biological miracle that is a part of the human language instinct. What we perceive is language or speech. We hear speech as a string of separate words. In the speech sound wave one word runs into the next seamlessly there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. In a foreign language, it becomes difficult to tell where one word ends and the other begin. No man-made system can match a human in decoding speech.

 

6- Can We Modify Our Understanding Through Ailments?

Human comprehension is fast and powerful yet an imperfect system. It is driven by expectations, memory, and decision-making. The human mind has a parser to parse sentences into phrasal groups. The Parser is a mental program that analyzes sentence structure during sentence comprehension.
 Several neurological and genetic impairments like Broca’s Aphasia, specific language impairment, hydrocephalus, and other intellectual impairments, have been found to cause a decline in the ability to communicate. A person still can have all their cognitive skills. Thus, language is instinctual and is alterable only if something occurs in the brain which may prevent proper speech.

Knowledge of vocabulary and the morphological processes of word formation are so complex that computer machines cannot capture them. Not even any other neural network models can. Morphology works uniquely. It is unpredictable and hence is not capturable by machines. Machine language works by analogy whereas morphology does not work completely by analogy. The way children learn and process morphology is not possible to replicate through machines.

Human language is a discrete combinatorial system at two levels – sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax and words are built out of morphemes by another set of rules, the rules of morphology machines cannot handle stress assignment (compounds which generally have stress on the first word while phrases on the second.)

 

7- How Does The Language Affect Thinking?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistics determinism states that people’s thoughts are the determinants of the categories made available by their language. The weaker version called linguistic relativity, states that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of speakers. The foundation categories of reality are not in the world. But something the culture imposes. The Hopi language or the Eskimo language can be good examples.

Are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain- in the form of ‘Mentalese’, a language that man assumes to work for information processing in the brain? And is supposedly different from the everyday language, which would require a two-fold translation – and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener?

 

What Is Thought?

Thoughts can take place in the absence of language. A Thought is not the same thing as language; sometimes it is challenging to put our thoughts into words and convey what we truly think. When we read or hear we remember every word, but just the gist. Thus, if thought were to depend on words, how would we coin a new word? To begin with, how can a child learn a word? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

The theoretical purpose of mentalese is to explain how genetically determined cognition can support the acquisition and use of language. The role of mentalese after the acquisition of language should remain open. In particular, we should not insist that mentalese delimits our thinking. For this purpose, if mentalese exists at all, it need not be the medium of thought.

Mentalese is even more fundamental to cognition than Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG). Chomsky hypothesized UG to be innate, that is, a pre-experimental, template of the principal features of the particular grammars that human individuals actually learn. But certainly not a complete description of any of them. UG is not absolute. In fact, its assumed adaptive function is to set boundary conditions for the acquisition of a particular grammar in a very restricted time frame. Since we are never again able to learn a language with the same velocity, our grasp of UG evidently diminishes after about the age of seven. However, without the mentalese, the language-learning child would not have the cognitive skills required to set the switches on his inherited universal grammar to adapt it to the surrounding linguistic culture.

 

8- The Evolution Of Language

All languages are bound by one common universal grammar. And the variations occur only in a small set of parameters. Languages may look different from one another, but they have many underlying similarities. Humans have an instinct for such similarities that they call genetically motivated linguistic inheritance. Languages do not differ freely and are classifiable under small groups. Rules of a language go under computation in the brain. All languages are symbolic systems and have a duality of patterning.

Languages can change from one grammatical type to another; can cycle among a few types over and over. Differences among languages are the effects of three processes over long periods: learning (heredity), linguistic innovation, and isolation ( migration) learning. Innovation and variation can occur in any part of the language.

Isolation and language contact: migration and the resultant separation: cultural identity and language change: migration leads to mingling and borrowings: migration also leads to the creation of pidgins and creoles and languages subsequently. Languages disappear for various reasons: the destruction of the habitats of their speakers, genocide, forced assimilation, assimilatory education, demographic submersion, and cultural annihilation.

 

Conclusion Of The Language Instinct

Steven pinker provides a comprehensive overview of the major sub-disciplines of linguistics as well as the aspects of cognitive science and evolutionary biology that inform our hypotheses about the innateness of linguistic capacity. Studies that concern acquisition, impairment, neural- net modeling, and comparisons with the skills of other species are under use to make it evident that language is ultimately innate.