An instinct for language

Life 25 June 1994

Most four-year-olds know thousands of words and have a sense of grammar and syntax that would put even the most powerful AI programs to shame. How can so much linguistic sophistication come from listening to parental baby talk?

Just over three decades ago, the American linguistic Noam Chomsky came up with an answer: the world’s languages are all governed by the same universal grammar and each baby is born with a knowledge of that grammar. This idea rocked the then-dominant creed of behaviourism which said, in a nutshell, that animals must learn everything from scratch. But it raised as many questions as it answered. How did the universal grammar evolve? How is it encoded in genes and the neural structures of the brain? If language is rooted in biology, what is its relationship to mind and thought?

Now, linguists are joining forces with neuropsychologists and molecular geneticists to find some answers. And Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies how infants learn language and was only an infant himself when Chomsky first outlined his theory, has attempted to explain this ambitious quest in a provocative book, The Language Instinct (Review, 26 February).

Why has it taken so long for Chomsky’s ideas to become so fashionable? Isn’t the current interest in language genes simply part of biology’s preoccupation with finding genetic explanations for behaviour and disease?

Certainly, people are receptive to the idea of there being genes for language. But just finding a gene tells you nothing about the logic of language and how it develops. Gene mania is only part of the story. …

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