How children pick up a language: Pinker's view (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, December 01, 2016, 13:22 (2913 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: So the question of how children develop language still revolves around an innate mechanism, not yet proven.

I find the whole discussion deeply unsatisfactory. Disregarding instincts – which may be the products of cell memory – how do any organisms learn? By experience and by copying, and by remembering what they have experienced and copied. In learning human language, the child copies the human sounds it hears, just as the cub and the calf and all other offspring will copy their particular animal sounds, gestures and other forms of behaviour, and the feral child will copy the language of the animal foster parent. We know that human language is vastly more complex than the grunts and gestures of our ancestors. So what? The process of learning is the same. What is innate is the ability, not just to learn language but simply to learn. And what is universal is not some mysterious grammar but the fact that every human society has created its own mass of sounds/words/structures to communicate whatever information becomes available to our enhanced consciousness. Hence the many different, often totally unrelated languages. “Innate structure”? Well, every human language consists of words strung together in a meaningful fashion. And every child that learns a particular language will learn the particular words and the particular ways they are strung together. And every child that learns this will have done so by copying and remembering. It’s a process of learning that is common practice throughout the animal world!