The Language Instinct. How The Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

The world’s leading expert in the field of language and psyche Steven Pinker reviews the most interesting facts about human language: which brain structures are responsible for our ability to communicate, whether there are special language genes, how language affects our outlook, what our ability to learn foreign languages depends on, and why we still cannot create good speech synthesizers.

Incredible discoveries made in recent decades by linguists, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists confirm Naom Chomsky’s hypothesis of a universal mental grammar (the mother of all languages) that underlies absolutely all human languages in the world.

This bold assumption means that absolutely all people on earth have linguistic abilities from birth, and language is nothing but an innate instinct embedded in the human brain by evolution. Understanding how mental grammar works will help, among other things, to learn a foreign language.

Speech Instinct won the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from The Linguistics Society of America.