The Language Instinct
How The Mind Creates Language
Readers rate it 3.9 (79 on Hardcover)
578 pages · Released Dec 14, 2010 · Harper Collins
Content report card
The Language Instinct parent’s guide: what’s inside
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A note for parents
This is a rigorous popular science book by a leading cognitive scientist that makes linguistics and psycholinguistics accessible to general readers. It contains no inappropriate content for mature teens and older, and is packed with genuine educational value about how language works, evolves, and is acquired by children. The book rewards curiosity and critical thinking about human cognition and language structure. It is dense and intellectually demanding, making it better suited to high school and college readers than younger audiences.
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From the publisher
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, weaves his vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats. Along the way, The Language Instinct luc... In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, weaves his vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats. Along the way, The Language Instinct lucidly explains the important issues your students need to know about language: how it works, how it evolved, how children learn it, how the brain computes it, and how it changes. “A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book.”—New York Times Book Review
Shelved under
- Psychology
- informative
- Philosophy
- Biolinguistics
- Language Arts & Disciplines
- Language and languages
- Long Now Manual for Civilization
- Psycholinguistcs
- Instinct (Philosophy)
- Language disorders
- Physiological aspects
- Linguistics
Books in the Language and Human Nature Tetralogy series
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ISBN 9780062032522 · Harper Collins