Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
The First Word summary
Christine Kenneally
The Search for the Origins of Language
Listen to the first key idea
Key idea 1 of 10
3.8 (10 ratings)
18 mins
10 key ideas
Audio & text
What is The First Word about?
The First Word examines the different theories and viewpoints that have been put forward in the past half a century on the complex topic of the origin of language.
About the Author
Christine Kenneally has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge, and she has written for publications such as Scientific American, The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Table of Contents
Key idea 1 of 10
Noam Chomsky claimed that human beings inherit the ability to acquire languages.
In 1959, a relatively unknown academic by the name of Noam Chomsky shocked the world of psychology by radically criticizing a book by psychologist B. F. Skinner.
At the time, Skinner had enjoyed almost God-like status for his theory of behaviorism, but Chomsky’s criticism of Skinner’s views on language-learning effectively “dethroned” him.
What made Chomsky’s review so revolutionary?
Well, the key idea in Skinner's behaviorism was the stimulus-response model. According to this idea, learning occurs when learners encounter a stimulus and give a response that then gets positive feedback. For example, a child who hears the sentence “The cat is black” and then uses it correctly later may get an enthusiastic applause from her mother.
But Chomsky pointed out that this model doesn’t explain language acquisition in children. They not only learn a huge number of words extremely quickly but also the rules for how words can be combined and recombined to create new sentences – all without being explicitly told how this should happen.
For example, a child who knows the sentences “The cat is black” and “The cat is small” will also know that these two sentences can be combined as “The cat is black and small” but not “The cat is black is small.”
And that’s where the stimulus-response model runs into trouble due to what Chomsky referred to as poverty of stimulus. In the example above, the child has never heard the combined sentence or the explicit grammatical rules for how sentences can be combined, so there’s not enough stimuli to explain why she can nevertheless produce the correct response.
Chomsky’s explanation was that language can be seen as a perfect, inherited system that pre-exists in the human brain. It’s the reason why children don’t need to learn the structures of language: they have them automatically from this inherited component. What’s more, he argued that only humans have this component, or else other species would also develop languages of their own.
Want to see all full key ideas from The First Word?
Key ideas in The First Word
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
Who should read The First Word
- Anyone interested in learning about where language comes from
- Anyone interested in how we can observe language in animals
Categories with The First Word
Books like The First Word
What our members say
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
Start growing with Blinkist now
25 Million
Downloads on all platforms
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
91%
Of Blinkist members create a better reading habit*
*Based on survey data from Blinkist customers