Then along came Noam Chomsky, the iconoclastic linguist and short-fused political gadfly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since this message was couched in terms of Chomskyan theoretical linguistics, in discourse so opaque that it was nearly incomprehensible even to some scholars, many people did not hear it. Now, in a brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book, Mr. Chomsky's colleague Steven Pinker, the director of M.I.T.'s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has brought Mr. Chomsky's findings to everyman. Most important, he never talks down to his reader. What Mr. Chomsky discovered was that most of the logic underlying all of the world's languages is wired into children's brains.
Children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire.
And underlying this distinction is a very subtle rule for combining plurals and compounds. But now things are different. In the prenatal state, humans apparently react instinctively to the melody, stress and timing of the mother's native speech. But these inborn linguistic mechanisms really take off at about 18 months after birth, and they are fully operating at about 3 years, when even the errors a child commits follow precise grammatical rules. Our brains slough this ability away as a butterfly sheds its pupal skin.