Alex!â Then all three grinned. Alex loved being the center of attention; the others figured theyâd just been given license to yell in the house.
4
A S TREAM OF S OUND
I n any one of thenearly seven thousand languages of the world, babies begin to communicate along a roughly similar schedule.Most begin to talk around their first birthday. They put words together in simple sentences like âeat cookieâ at about a year and a half. They pick up as many as ten words a day in their twos and, by the time theyâre three, most are speaking in sentences and know over one thousand words. For English speakers, there are only another fifty thousand more to learn by adulthood.
How do children do it? Here is where the answers get harder. Learning language is âdoubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform,â said Leonard Bloomfield, a major linguist of the early twentieth century. Itâs so difficult, computers still canât do it; so far, they have been successfully programmed to fluently understand only one speaker at a time. Yet babies and young children master this enormous task so naturally, few of us even remember making the effort.From Saint Augustine to Charles Darwin to Noam Chomsky to modern-day linguists, a subset of whom are also neuroscientists, a long line of thinkers have pondered the question. Todayâs views on how babies accomplish the feat owe much to the ideas that Chomsky put forward in the late 1950s, when he burst onto the language scene and spearheaded the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology.
Up to that point, the behaviorists, led by B. F. Skinner, held sway. Expanding from Pavlovâs famous experiments in which dogs could be made to salivate at the ringing of a bell, the behaviorists maintained that animals and children were essentially blank slates and could be conditioned to do almost anything, provided the stimuli and setting were right. Language, argued Skinner, was just another behavior, a âverbal behavior.âChomsky disagreed and wrote a devastating review of Skinnerâs work.
Chomskyâs main idea directly contradicted the behaviorists and was hugely controversial at the time. Some aspects of it are still debatedâeven by Chomsky himselfâbut many of its tenets are widely accepted today. He argued that babies arrive in the world with an innate ability for language. Nature, said Chomsky, has provided children with a surprising level of knowledge about language that they canât have had time to learnââthe language instinct,â Steven Pinker called it in his bestselling 1994 book of that name. Chomsky believed children had a native ability to deploy what he called âuniversal grammar,â referring not to the details of parsing sentences but rather to an unconscious, tacit sense of some basic universal principles of languageâso basic they apply whether the child will grow up to speak English, Swahili, or Chinese. For example: All languages have consonants and vowels, they have nouns and verbs, and they have pitches, contours, and intonations; phrases, not words, are the building blocks of sentences, and the rules governing how one can move those phrases around are the same.Universal grammar explained how children could know that Chomskyâs famous nonsensical sentenceââColorless green ideas sleep furiouslyââwas grammatically correct, while the same words rearrangedââFuriously sleep ideas green colorlessââcreated a sentence that was gobbledygook, neither grammatical nor understandable.
Even if the ability to learn language is innate, we do not all begin speaking equally well. Language literature is populated with examples of âwild children,â such asVictor of Aveyron, who lived alone in the woods of eighteenth-century France until he was about twelve, orGenie, a California victim of horrific abuse who was
John B. Garvey, Mary Lou Widmer