The Language Instinct

What Hacker News says

1. dwhitneySep 2026
   Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” is not a bad book for learning grammar. It’s a book about linguistics - not specifically grammar, but it covers diagramming sentences, and grammar falls out from there
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2. iLemmingMar 2025
   I asked an LLM the same questions, and that's what I got:

   Here are some key resources on language psychology and acquisition:

   1. "Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics" by Julie Sedivy - Covers basic concepts and neural basis of language

   2. "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker - Classic work on language acquisition and development

   3. "Foundations of Bilingual Memory" by Heredia & Altarriba - Explains why early exposure shapes sound perception abilities

   Writing system changes mainly affect literacy, less so speech. The brain processes spoken and written language somewhat separately.

   For deeper research, look up "phonological acquisition" and "critical period hypothesis" in scientific journals.

   --

   Would appreciate human input on these topics as well. Thanks.

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3. anticsDec 2024
   Because there people (like Yann LeCun) who do not hear language in their head when they think, at all. Language is the last-mile delivery mechanism for what they are thinking.

   If you'd like a more detailed and in-depth summary of language and its relationship to cognition, I highly recommend Pinker's The Language Instinct, both for the subject and as perhaps the best piece of popular science writing ever.

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4. nhatcherJun 2023
   Chomsky did quite a lot of things in linguistics. This is about whether or not there is a universal grammar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

   There is a fairly interesting read from Steven Pinker: "The language instinct" about this topic.

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5. steven_nobleMay 2023
   "The Language Instinct", by language psychologist Steven Pinker, gave me a new way of thinking about the old nature/nurture issue.

   The easy solution has always been to say "Nature? Nurture? It's a bit of both". But really, that invites the response: "Both nature and nurture? Sure. Of course. But both of them in what way?"

   In the case of language it's really interesting. It seems that biologically, we are very very strongly primed to learn language ("nature"). And to learn it in certain ways and at certain life stages.

   But of course, at the same, the language or languages that we learn are incredibly diverse, and these differences do not map in any way to the physical differences between our bodies ("nurture").

   So, in the case of human language, that's "the how" for how nature and nurture come together. Maybe it applies to other areas too where the nature/nurture debate still rages.

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6. alecstJul 2021
   1. Accents are evidence that the speaker did not fully acquire the phonology of the language. A French native speaker will speak English with a French accent because they haven't acquired the full English phonological inventory. Children who learn a language don't have this problem.

   2. Children will learn colors and shapes just fine without explicit instruction. They do it all the time. In the pre-developed world, children didn't get taught how to speak. There were no flash cards or toys for learning numbers. They just learned by observing.

   3. Letters is something else. The orthography of a language -- learning how to write it -- is a different beast from learning how to speak it. Education is necessary here. So we agree about that, for sure. No one will passively acquire how to write.

   4. Children make errors in production all the time. As they learn a language they make generalizations -- generalizations that actually make sense, like "mines" -- but which are considered "wrong" by adult speakers. They'll correct themselves over time without instruction.

   You might want to check out reading Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct," it has a lot of ideas and research that might be new to you.

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