What is the main message of The Language Instinct?

Understanding language as an innate human instinct.

How long does it take to read The Language Instinct?

Reading time varies, but Blinkist summary can be read in minutes.

Is The Language Instinct a good book? Is it worth reading?

Worth reading for insights on language and human nature.

Who is the author of The Language Instinct?

The author of The Language Instinct is Steven Pinker.

The Language Instinct Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: The Language Instinct
Rating: 4 (135 reviews)
Author: Steven Pinker

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Discover why learning your first language was so easy.

Why is it that you pick up your mother tongue so naturally, while trying to learn languages in adulthood sometimes feels like banging your head against a wall?

And why is it that, barring the common mix-ups and misunderstandings, we are so adept at communicating with each other almost effortlessly?

The answers to these questions lie in the nature of language and our innate ability to communicate with words: our language instinct.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how language is structured and why human beings are especially good at picking it up. In addition, you’ll learn all about the neuroscience behind our amazing linguistic skills.

You’ll also discover

how children use grammatical rules that nobody has taught them;
how you can intuitively differentiate one wug from two wugs; and
why Siri has such a hard time figuring out what you said.

Key idea 1 of 10

We are all born with a language instinct.

Think for a moment about how easy it is to turn the thoughts in your head into meaningful sentences. Where did this skill come from? While many people believe we learn grammar in the classroom, our knowledge of it precedes the moment we are born!

Indeed, very young children have an innate understanding of grammatical structure that they couldn’t possibly have learned. The idea that grammatical rules are hardwired into the brain was first put forward by the famous linguist Noam Chomsky in his theory of Universal Grammar.

According to Chomsky, children don’t learn how to speak from their parents or anyone else, but rather by using their innate grammar skill. As a consequence, Chomsky reasoned, all languages have the same basic underlying structure.

One of Chomsky’s main arguments for this is the poverty of the stimulus, which demonstrates that children understand verb and noun structures they couldn’t have learned.

For example, to turn the phrase “a unicorn is in the garden” into a question, you must simply move the “is” to the front of the sentence. However, for the phrase “a unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden,” you have to rearrange more than just the first “is” to turn the phrase into a question. To make a grammatically sound sentence, you have to move the second “is.”

Chomsky correctly claimed that children would never make the mistake of misapplying the first strategy for creating a question to the second, more complex sentence. In subsequent experiments, no children moved the wrong “is,” even with sentences they could have never heard before.

Furthermore, deaf children use correct grammar in their signs without ever studying it.

Psychologists studied a deaf boy named Simon, whose two deaf parents only learned sign language in adulthood, and thus made various grammatical mistakes.

Simon, on the other hand, didn’t make the same mistakes, despite only ever being exposed to his parents’ style of signing. The only way to account for this is that Simon had an innate knowledge of grammar that precluded him from making his parents’ mistakes.

Key idea 2 of 10

The popular idea that our words affect our perception is false.

Despite its popularity, there’s no basis for what is known as linguistic relativity, i.e., the idea that the structure of our language influences the way we perceive and understand the world. Linguistic relativity is also called the Whorfian Hypothesis, after the linguist Benjamin Whorf.

Whorf was an amateur scholar of Native American languages, and made several claims that Native Americans viewed the world differently due to the structure and vocabulary of their language.

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Key idea 3 of 10

Language is based on two principles.

So how is it that we so effortlessly communicate with one another? Well, human language follows two principles which facilitate an ease in communication.

The first principle is the arbitrariness of the sign. This idea, first introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, relates to the way in which we pair a sound with a meaning. For example, the word “dog” does not sound like a dog – it doesn’t bark like a dog, nor does it walk like a dog. The word has no inherent “dogness,” but nonetheless retains its meaning.

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Key idea 4 of 10

Grammar might get all the attention, but words are interesting too.

Much as we are composed of cells, which themselves are composed of smaller particles, sentences and phrases are composed of words, which are made in turn from small bits of grammatical information called morphemes. These morphemes are governed by the rules of morphology.

Take the hypothetical word wug, for example. “Wug” is a morpheme. By adding the morpheme for pluralization, the suffix -s, to the end of a “wug,” we end up with a group of wugs.

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Key idea 5 of 10

Our ability to understand speech is like a sixth sense.

How is it that we can put a man on the moon and yet be unable to build a computer that recites back what we say?

Speech, as opposed to written language, does not have any clearly demarcated breaks between words.

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Key idea 6 of 10

We understand written language because we are highly skilled “parsers.”

Up to this point, we’ve focused mostly on spoken language. But how exactly do we make sense of the strange symbols written upon the pages of a book?

We understand sentences by first parsing them, breaking them up into their component parts and referring to their grammatical roles in order to understand their meaning.

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Key idea 7 of 10

Childhood is a critical period for developing our innate language skills.

As we’ve learned, we’re all born with the innate ability to acquire language. However, we still need a playground to hone our skills.

When they’re still young, children are essentially vacuum cleaners for words. The author estimates that an average six-year-old has an amazing vocabulary of around 13,000 words!

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Key idea 8 of 10

Our language instinct could have come about through evolution.

We haven’t yet touched on the origins of the language instinct. Could it be possible that our natural ability for language was part of the evolutionary process?

Some, including Chomsky, doubt the language instinct’s compatibility with Darwinian evolution.

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Key idea 9 of 10

Chill out about good grammar – it’s more arbitrary than you think.

Recent decades have seen a growing obsession with grammatical rules. Today’s “grammar Nazis” are quick to point out things like confusing “their” and “there,” or decry split infinitives as the mark of the uneducated. But is this fair?

In short: no, it’s not.

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Key idea 10 of 10