Here Is Your New One Mr. Pinker

Jonathan Dishon
ENGL 1101
Ms. Hughes
August 28, 2009

While Steven Pinker may be going on the 25th year of publication for his book that does not mean that his book by any means is correct. Pinker believes that a child learns the language of his parents solely on biology alone, and that the child does not imitate the parents in any way. This statement however is impractical. The fact that children usually grow up speaking the same language as their parents, and in the same dialect as their parents for that matter puts Pinker’s idea of learning language right in the recycle bin. A child is not programmed like a robot to just understand and be able to speak language as it grows up. It has to learn it and all the rules that go along with it, and the child does this through imitation. The child will emulate what its parents do in order to learn. I will admit that biology may have a little bit to do with the learning of language, but it is definitely not everything. To use Pinker’s example of the lady in Britain with chatterbox syndrome, she was highly capable of communicating language, but she was mentally ill. Everything that she said was also a completely made up story. She would talk about bank statements and joint accounts when she had never even been to a bank. So how could she know about all these things that have to do with banks without having heard someone else use them before? My friend Pinker would say that she was born knowing it, but how many people are just born knowing stuff about banks. Actually how many adults even know a lot about banks? This lady has obviously heard people either in her own house or on the television even talking about bank statements and bank accounts and so on. This means that she has obviously used imitation in order to communicate language with other people, and was not born with the ability to know banks and how they work.
While there may be some validity to Pinker’s idea of biology being a contributor to the learning of language it is by far not the most important. It may help it to know how the child is supposed to talk, but the child does not learn language from it. The child learns language and how to speak by imitation. It will either imitate its parents, which is most common, or the child will imitate someone else like a role model or hero, but either way the biggest contributor to the learning of language is imitation.