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<blockquote data-quote="Marius Delphus" data-source="post: 405250" data-attributes="member: 447">Along the Chomsky vein is the book &quot;The Language Instinct&quot; by Steven Pinker. Pinker (as Chomsky before him) claims the ability to learn language structure may be intrinsic to humans in early childhood (we lose most of this ability before entering puberty, goes the theory; one reason children are much more capable of picking up second languages than adults).There is another thread of language philosophy/linguistics that holds Chomsky and company (including Pinker) are blowing a lot of hot air and have no empirical data to back up their claims. The book &quot;Educating Eve&quot; by Geoffrey Sampson is cited as an explication of this point of view.Just a friendly research reminder. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> (Also, make use of those bibliographies!)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Marius Delphus, post: 405250, member: 447"] Along the Chomsky vein is the book "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. Pinker (as Chomsky before him) claims the ability to learn language structure may be intrinsic to humans in early childhood (we lose most of this ability before entering puberty, goes the theory; one reason children are much more capable of picking up second languages than adults). There is another thread of language philosophy/linguistics that holds Chomsky and company (including Pinker) are blowing a lot of hot air and have no empirical data to back up their claims. The book "Educating Eve" by Geoffrey Sampson is cited as an explication of this point of view. Just a friendly research reminder. :) (Also, make use of those bibliographies!) [/QUOTE]

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