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Alex!” Then all three grinned. Alex loved being the center of attention; the others figured they’d 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 “eat cookie” at about a year and a half. They pick up as many as ten words a day in their twos and, by the time they’re 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 “doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform,” said Leonard Bloomfield, a major linguist of the early twentieth century. It’s so difficult, computers still can’t 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. Today’s 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 Pavlov’s 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 “verbal behavior.”Chomsky disagreed and wrote a devastating review of Skinner’s work.
    Chomsky’s main idea directly contradicted the behaviorists and was hugely controversial at the time. Some aspects of it are still debated—even by Chomsky himself—but 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 can’t have had time to learn—“the language instinct,” Steven Pinker called it in his bestselling 1994 book of that name. Chomsky believed children had a native ability to deploy what he called “universal grammar,” referring not to the details of parsing sentences but rather to an unconscious, tacit sense of some basic universal principles of language—so 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 Chomsky’s famous nonsensical sentence—“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”—was grammatically correct, while the same words rearranged—“Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”—created 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 “wild children,” 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