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.

Where is 'Genie' now?

After studying the case of ‘Genie’ in our chapter on Language Acquisition, several of my TESOL students were curious about what happened to the "Wild Child" later in life. She's still alive, and if you're interested in finding out more, here are a few links to help you.

• "Genie" (Wikipedia entry)


• Mockingbird Don't Sing
  (a film based on Genie's life)
  
• "Wild Child Speechless After Tortured Life"
  (a recent feature article by ABC News which describes how Genie regressed in later life.)
  
• "Secret of the Wild Child"
  (This is a transcript of the documentary we watched in class.)

In 1970, a 13-year-old child abuse victim was discovered by police in Los Angeles, California. She was given the nickname “Genie” by social workers because it was as if she had just appeared – like a genie out of a bottle – into adolescence, having skipped "normal" early childhood.

She was completely isolated by her abusive father for more than 12 years, so isolated, in fact, that she never developed the ability to speak. Lenneberg and other linguists have used Genie's case as evidence for the Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that if children do not have normal exposure to language before puberty, they will never be able to develop language skills.