Why toddlers say goed: Steven Pinker's case that language is an evolved instinct
A child who says goed instead of went is not failing at English but applying a rule too eagerly. Steven Pinker built a career on such slips, arguing with Alan Prince that grammar mixes memorised words with symbolic rules, and that the whole capacity for language was shaped by natural selection.
Pinker was born in Montreal on September 18, 1954, into a secular Jewish, English-speaking family. His grandparents had come from Poland and Romania in 1926 and ran a small necktie factory; his father practised law and his mother, a voracious reader, became a high-school vice-principal. He dropped religion at 13 and credits George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity with first making him love science. After McGill he earned a Harvard doctorate in experimental psychology in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn.
His early work on vision, with Kosslyn, found that mental images capture a scene from one particular viewpoint rather than as a full three-dimensional object. He then turned to how children learn their mother tongue, and from 1982 to 2003 taught in MIT's brain and cognitive sciences department before becoming Harvard's Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.
His 1988 critique with Prince targeted a connectionist computer model of how the past tense is learned. Language, Pinker countered, runs on two systems: associative memory for sounds and meanings, which is why irregular forms must be learned one at a time, and rules that combine symbols, which is why children overapply them. He popularised the idea in Words and Rules. In 1990 he and Paul Bloom argued that the language faculty evolved gradually by natural selection, against Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould, who saw it as a sudden accident; the paper revived research into the prehistory of speech.
Inspired by Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker to write for the public, he published The Language Instinct in 1994, then How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. Time listed him among the world's 100 most influential people in 2004. Away from the lab he is a keen cyclist and married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.
Source: Steven Pinker
