Armed with a facility for universal grammar, as he dubbed it, the average toddler formulates a plan for speaking a native tongue based on the overheard conversations of a limited circle of adults. The youngster then creates all sorts of novel, meaningful expressions, as well as predictable kinds of errors. Inspired by evolutionary theory, some scientists have elaborated on Chomsky's proposal. In their view, humanity's gift of gab derives from genetically sculpted brain circuits devoted to basic grammar and word skills. Through their contributions to our ancestors' survival, such prewired mechanisms assumed neural prominence over thousands of generations, according to these researchers.
People know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.
Two related realms of investigation now challenge Pinker's view, Seidenberg asserts in the March 14 Science. The first has more to do with nets than with webs. Connectionist, or neural network, theories try to explain various behaviors or mental feats by drawing analogies with the learning exhibited by interconnected processing units in a computer system. The mathematical strength of connections among these units gradually changes as the system learns to solve a particular problem. The computer network eventually assumes a stable pattern of activity that successfully tackles both the familiar problem and related new challenges.