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this is a minority view, if you count noses. Most of the work on language doesn’t even comprehend these developments or take them seriously.
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    Is the acquisition of language biological?
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    I don’t see how anyone could doubt that. Just consider a newborn infant. The newborn is barraged by all kinds of stimuli, what William James famously called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” 1 If you put, say, a chimpanzee or a kitten or a songbird in that environment, it can only pick out what’s related to its own genetic capacities. A songbird will pick out a melody of its species or something from all this mass because it’s designed to do that, but it can’t pick out anything that’s relevant to human language. On the other hand, an infant does. The infant instantly picks language-related data out of this mass of confusion. In fact, we now know that this goes on even in the uterus. Newborn infants can detect properties of their mother’s language as distinct from certain—not all, but certain—other languages.
    And then comes a very steady progression of acquisition of complex knowledge, most of it completely reflexive. Teaching doesn’t make any difference. An infant is just picking it out of the environment. And it happens very fast, in a very regular fashion. A lot is known about this process. By about six months, the infant has already analyzed what’s called the prosodic structure of the language, stress, pitch—languages differ that way—and has sort of picked out the language of its mother or whatever it hears, its mother and its peers. By about nine months, roughly, the child has picked out the relevant sound structure of the language. So when we listen to Japanese speakers speaking English, we notice that, from our point of view, they confuse “r” and “l,” meaning they don’t know the distinction. That’s already fixed in an infant’s mind by less than a year old.
    Words are learned very early, and, if you look at the meaning of a word with any care, it’s extremely intricate. But children pick up words often after only one exposure, which means the structure has got to be in the mind already. Something is being tagged with a particular sound. By, say, two years, there’s pretty good evidence that the children have mastered the rudiments of the language. They may just produce one-word or two-word sentences, but there’s now experimental and other evidence that a lot more is in there. By three or four, a normal child will have extensive language capacity.
    Either this is a miracle or it’s biologically driven. There are just no other choices. There are attempts to claim that language acquisition is a matter of pattern recognition or memorization, but even a superficial look at those proposals shows that they collapse very quickly. It doesn’t mean that they’re not being pursued. In fact, those lines of inquiry are very popular. In my view, though, they’re just an utter waste of time.
    There are some very strange ideas out there. For instance, a lot of quite fashionable work claims that children acquire language because humans have the capacity to understand the perspective of another person, according to what’s called theory of mind. The capacity to tell that another person is intending to do something develops in normal children at roughly age three or four. But, in fact, if you look at the autism spectrum, one of the classic syndromes is failure to develop theory of mind. That’s why autistic kids, or adults for that matter, don’t seem to understand what other people’s intentions are. Nevertheless, their language can be absolutely perfect. Furthermore, this capacity to understand the intention of others develops long after the child has mastered almost all the basic character of the language, maybe all of it. So that can’t be the explanation.
    There are other