1. The Language Instinct Chapter 9 Baby Born Talking-- Describes Heaven Pinker, S. (2007). The Language Instinct: How the mind creates Language. New York: Harper Perennial. Harper Collins.

4. Age of baby Language Development Under 6 months Able to distinguish phonemes used in different language that adults are unable to distinguish. 6 months Beginning to lump together the distinct sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while continuing to discriminate distinct ones that their language keeps seperate. 10 months They can no longer distinguish different phonemes of languages. They begin to sort the sounds directly, tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language. This module serves as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar. Around 1 st birthday Begin to understand words and produce them. Words are usually produced in isolation- a one word stage 18 months Language takes off and vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain until adolescence. Between the late 2's and mid 3's Language booms into fluent grammatical conversation. Sentence length increases steadily and the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the 1,000's before the 3 rd birthday.

5. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move muscle in which way to make which change in sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents. Age of baby Speech Production System newborn Vocal tract like a nonhuman mammal. The larynx comes up like a periscope and engages the nasal passage, forcing the infant to breathe through the nose and making it anatomically possible to drink and breathe at the same time. By 3 months The larynz has descended deep into the throat, opening up the cavity behind the tongue that allows the tongue to move forwards and backwards and produce the variety of voewl sounds used by adults. 5-7 months Begin to play with sound, rather than using them to express their physical and emotional states, and their sequences of click, hums, glides, trills, hisses, ans smacks begin to babble in real syllables. The sounds are the same in all languages. By end of 1 st year Vary their syllables like neh-nee, da-dee, and meh-neh, and produce gibberish.

10. Chapter 10: Language Organs and Grammar Genes

13. Broca’s Area Is adjacent to the part of the motor-control strip dedicated to the jaws, lip, and tongue, and it was once thought that it was involved in the production of language. Broca’s aphasia: damage to the area resulting in a syndrome of slow, labored, ungrammatical speech. Implicated in grammatical processing Damage to area alone does not produce long lasting severe aphasia; however the surrounding areas must be damaged as well. Connected by a band of fibers to a second language organ, Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s aphasia is in some ways the compliment of Broca’s. The role of Broca’s area in language is unclear. Perhaps the area underlies grammatical processing by converting messages in mentalese into grammatical structures and vice versa, in part by communicating via the basal ganglia with the prefrontal lobes, which subserve abstract reasoning and knowledge.

14. Wernicke’s aphasia A symptom is that patients show few signs of comprehending the speech around them. Patients utter fluent streams of more-or-less grammatical phrases, but their speech makes no sense and is filled with neoglisms and word substitutions. Patients have consistent difficulty naming objects; they come up with related words or distortions of the correct one. A third kind of apasia: Damage to the connection between Broca’a area and Wernicke’s area resulting in the patient being unable to repeat sentences.

15. To be honest…no one really knows what either Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area is for. There are indications that these regions in the rear of the perisylvian are implicated in storing and receiving words. Anatomy: the language sub organs within the perisylvian might be: front of the perisylvian (Broca’s area), grammatical processing; rear of the perisylvian (Wernicke’s area and the 3 lobe junction), the sounds of words, especially nouns, and some aspects of their meaning.

16. We will never understand language organs and grammar genes by looking for postage stamp sized globs of brain. The computations underlying mental life are caused by the wiring of the intricate networks that make up the cortex, networks with millions of neurons, with each neuron connected to thousands of others, operating in thousandths of a second. Pinker expects the basic design of language, from X-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure, to be uniform across the species.. The complexity of language circuitry leaves plenty of scope for quantitative variation to combine into unique linguistic profiles. Some module might be relatively stunned or hypertrophied. Some normally unconscious representation of sound or meaning or grammatical structure might be more accessible to the rest of the brain. Some connection between language circuitry and the intellect or emotions might be faster or slower.