From: "Philip Hart" <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> > Which word? If "instinct", I'm referring to the (afaik) dominant school > of thought in linguistics which holds that our incredible language > acquisition skill as children is driven by preprogrammed traits which > are primed by experience (aka "instincts"). > > Not to pooh-pooh the rest of the animal kingdom, but humans are > qualitatively different. A group of children hearing an ungrammatical > mess from parents speaking pidgin will develop a full-scale language > of exquisite expressivity. I'm not too sure about this. I do think that we, as a species, are exquisitly (sorry for the theft) primed to LEARN (in general, not just w.r.t language). It's been genetically advantageous for us to learn and learn fast. One reason I've read that explains why we are born so helpless is that it's been shown that we learn faster if the slate is "clean", ie the brain isn't very set in its ways. However, the downside of this is that we need parents or a tribe to care for our young while their brain is developing, so we've found it darn convenient to make societies, big or small. However, this isn't a qalitative difference, since most mammals are born in a state of relative helplessness and the more "advanced" the brain is, the more helpless the young are when they are born. ie, a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference. (or maybe I just use those q-words wrong) To sum up my pre-coffee rant: Human nature is not limited to learning language fast, but rather to _learn_ fast, in general. Which, I believe, just goes to show that "human nature" is a term that's very rarely used correctly whenever you hear the phrase uttered. Usually it's used in conjunction with words like "homosexuals are unnatural" or "It's natural to become a racist if you've been a victim of a racial crime". If that is "human nature" then I want no part of it. Anyway, I took off on a tangent. Sorry for that and the abuse of your language. :-)