Final Summary

Finally, the concluding chapters were less about the roots of linguistics and monster syntax trees which made my eyes cross. The concluding chapters were about something that had peaked my interest when I first started this class and about an issue I had questions about when I began reading this book. In the beginning of the book Mr. pinker goes into great detail trying to support his theory that there is a language instinct. That babies are born with this magical ability to process and churn out wonderfully constructed grammatically correct language without so much of a blink of an eye, when second language learners, later in life, can spend years of tireless effort trying to learn a new language and still come up short. In the chapter Baby Born Talking-Describes Heaven, the author addresses a loophole in his argument so far, why don't babies, if they truly have this instinct, come straight out the womb talking? In an article from The Sun, they claimed that a baby had begun to speak about heaven “Life in heaven is grand, a baby told an astounded obstetrical team seconds after birth. Tiny Naomi Monstefusco literally came into the world singing praises of God's firmament. The miracle so shocked the delivery room team, one nurse ran screaming down the hall.”(pinker 265). The only explanation for this event and others like it, is that once in the womb the baby can actually hear echos of their mother's speech and since babies are born with the ability to produce common sounds, it is somewhat likely that these stories are not complete fiction and do have some merit. My real question was though, how do babies really develop language if the “instinct” does not just automatically generate it. Through another concluding chapter called Language Organs and Grammar Genes, in which pinker discussed how the brain actually had specific parts that have shown evidence to be part of understanding speech, producing it, and making it grammatical. These parts of the brain are in the frontal lobe and are called Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Pinker vaguely answered my questioned by stating that babies do not develop language on their own using these unique instinct in their brain, but their instinct is fueled by the language the baby is exposed to, that in fact, motherese was helpful even if not grammatically correct. What I found most interesting was that how the babies were exposed to language greatly affected how much of the language the child would learn if the child would learn it at all. In fact, several experiments were conducted where babies were only exposed to language through television and these babies never developed any language, as opposed to babies raised with Motherese who were very linguisticly advanced. I am still unsure of the connection between how babies learn language and how this relates to the language instinct. If I could speak to Mr. pinker I would ask him about the best environment for babies to learn language and how this directly affected the parts of the brain pinker identified as being responsible for the language instinct. My question about the nature of language would be the best way in which children should acquire language, under what circumstances, and how that relates to the language instinct portions of the brain.