Culture and language development

In The Language Instinct , Steven Pinker (1994 : 15–16) celebrates the acquisition of language as “one of the wonders of the natural world”, the mundane yet remarkable ability of human beings to “shape events in each other’s brains” with words. By the utterance of a sequence of sounds, for instance, a one-year-old child manipulates the mental awareness of a caretaker to an undetected soiled diaper or a preference for warm or cold milk. Yet Pinker (1994 : 18) argues, along the lines of various innatist or linguistic nativist perspectives, this ability is “not a cultural artifact … but a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains”. Chomsky (1965) famously postulated a theory of Universal Grammar which sought to explain how young children could so readily adopt most of the complex deep structures embedded in any language, not to mention creatively generate acceptable sentences of incredible variety. Chomsky (1965) argued this feat could only be accomplished by means of a genetically inherited Language Acquisition Device, a hypothesized cognitive structure of pre-programmed constraints and possibilities, which exists a priori in children as a set of ‘switches’ (for instance, between a Subject-Verb-Object or a Subject-Object-Verb pattern) that are then calibrated to the specific primary language a child is reared in.