On Friday, December 17, 2004, at 08:36AM, Louann Miller <lqmiller at ev1.net> wrote: >At 08:10 AM 12/16/2004 -0800, Frank Mayhar wrote: >>The cool thing about this is that apparently infants have all the neural >>structures needed for the acquisition of any human language. After about >>age three or so, though, unused structures atrophy and disappear while >>used structures are strengthened and elaborated. > >Extremely excellent book: "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. While the book is excellent, take it with a grain of salt. There is counter-evidence to the "semantic bootstrapping" theories of Pinker, and he's quite an innatist/neo-Chomskian. I'm not a linguist (but I was a speech scientist, so I'm not a complete hack), but from what I remember from my child language acquisition classes (though this wasn't my specialty), a balanced environment/biological origin is much more likely to be correct with any system as complicated as human language. I'm not saying that Pinker isn't at least partially correct, but maybe he's a little too narrowly focused. Matthew