Steven Pinker

For those of you interested in Language Acquisition, a fascinating author to check out is Steven Pinker.

Although now a professor at Harvard University, Pinker taught at MIT for more than twenty years in their Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, eventually becoming director for the Center for Cognitive Science there. (Check out his current research topics here.)

He is best known for his idea that human language developed in a Darwinian fashion through natural selection, and this is the subject of his best-selling popular science book The Language Instinct.

This book explores ideas of innatism, in many ways following the theories established by Noam Chomsky but differing from them in other ways, as well. (This book can be found in our SKKU-GU TESOL Library.)

Another of Pinker's best-selling books, Words and Rules, explores the various ways the brain acquires and interacts with language.

He suggests that the brain acquires and stores different aspects of language in different ways. Vocabulary, idioms, and irregular verbs, for example, are catalogued in a 'mental dictionary,' while rules of syntax and morphology are aquired by trial-and-error rule development (based, of course, on our innate 'language instinct') and are stored and accessed differently.