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Questions and Answers:
Professor Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, the Peter De Florez Professor of Psychology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is the author of The Language Instinct and Words and Rules. His next book, The Blank Slate, will be published in fall 2002. Has your study of twins indicated nature or nurture is dominant in language learning? We knew beforehand that our study could not demonstrate that nature or nurture is dominant in language acquisition. Both are crucial: without hearing English sentences (or Japanese ones, or Yiddish ones, and so on), children could not learn their native language; yet without a human brain that is adapted to the task of learning language, all the sentences in the world would not be enough to acquire one. But we seem to be finding that some of the *differences* among children are more or less sensitive to differences in their genes and their environments. The rate of vocabulary growth in one-year-olds seems to depend more on how much language they hear, whereas the point at which they start combining words into microsentences like "sweater chair" and "allgone outside" depends more on their genes. Why did you choose past tense verbs as a key to understanding how language works? Regular past-tense forms are like fruit flies: small and easy to breed, yet they contain the same combinatorial apparatus as more complex systems in easily visible form. When you hear a verb for the first time-say, "to spam," "to diss," or "to flame"--you instinctively know that their past-tense forms are "spammed," "dissed," and "flamed," even though you have never heard those forms before. This shows that you must have an ability to combine bits of words (stems and suffixes) into words in real time, using some mental equivalent of the past-tense rule "add -ed." This is a small and easy-to-study instance of what makes language so powerful--our ability to combine a finite number of words into an infinite number of bigger words, phrases, and sentences, allowing us to express an unlimited number of creative ideas. Also, regular past tense forms come with a convenient control group-irregular past-tense forms, like "bring-brought," "spring-sprang," and "come-came." They are idiosyncratic, and have to be memorized, yet do the same thing as regular forms. So by contrasting them, we can study the difference between on-line computation and memory lookup in the language system. For example, I have examined 20,000 past-tense forms in the speech of children, focusing on errors such as "we holded the baby rabbits" and "Horton heared a Who," which show that the child is applying--indeed, overapplying--the regular past-tense rule. What light has the Human Genome Project shed on language development? Only a tiny bit. Thanks to the HGP, the first gene associated with a disorder of language and speech was identified last fall. The authors of the study suggested that the gene plays a role in the assembly of brain structures necessary for the acquisition and use of language and speech. Not a lot can be concluded from this study yet, but it may be the beginning of an exciting new area of research.
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology