The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Language for Everyone

Steven Pinker is a professor at Harvard College as well as a professor in evolutionary psychology and computational theory of mind at Harvard University. Even though Pinker is very specific and technical in his experimental work, Pinker writes his books for the general audience to read. Steven Pinker used experimental subjects in the fields of mental imagery, shape recognition, as well as visual attention. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language is a book I would recommend to an interested audience because the unique methods Pinker takes advantage of such as visual sentences, vocabulary lists, and example words help get across information to his readers in unique ways. The central idea that The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language really highlights is that humans are born with an instinct for language. The definition of innate is inborn or originating in the mind. The book really emphasizes that the instinct of language is innate. The key point that Steven Pinker makes about language being instinct is that language is not new, but it is there and ready to be learned by humans when they are born. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language covers many broad topics such as evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral genetics. The book is written in a very interesting style. Not only were the above topics discussed and analyzed by Pinker with words, Pinker also used visuals to help convey his important points about the topics. The visuals that Pinker used include sentence structure equations, which included multiple words for different scenarios. Another visual used was a tree diagram to help form the structure of the sentence. The interesting part of the style was that it was universal for all humans because it is innate, and humans learn language the in the same methods. Through the many examples Pinker gives to help illustrate to the audience how language is innate, he also makes a claim that language is not only i...