Jenni Potts

Human Knowledge Acquisition

November 5, 2002

The Language Instinct Chapters 6 and 7

Pinker’s points in these two chapters are extremely interesting. In the Sounds of Silence, he begins the chapter by discussing how we only notice where one word ends and the next one begins because of our own mental expectations and knowledge of the language we’re listening to. He believes that there are no “blank spaces” in speech like there are on this page I’m writing. I never would have come up with this idea. I always assumed that when we talk, there are boundaries between each word and that it is not “seamless” as Pinker implies. When he mentioned the example of listening to a foreign language, however, it became completely clear to me. When I listen to French, for example, I have no clue where words start and end, it all sounds like one “endless stream” to me. His oronyms example also proves this idea by showing that we can cut up phrases to form different words.

I was also fascinated by his descriptions of how we speak. This information is all so new to me. The fact that there are only 6 organs we have to produce sounds is unbelievable to me when I think about the many phonemes we have in the English language alone.

I also found his points about phonetic symbolism intriguing. Sounds like i in bit and ee in teeny make us think of small things, Pinker points out. I think this is amazing, but I’m still not sure what the reasoning is behind it. Why is it that certain sounds bring certain ideas to mind? It must be some innate part of our brains. Description of size has probably existed since we could speak. Perhaps in the very early days of human evolution those sounds were made for little objects.

I also enjoyed making sounds and paying attention to what my mouth was doing while Pinker pointed out the various phonemes in our language and how we form them, another subject most people don’t give thought to. I probably sounded like an idiot to anyone who heard me, but I tried to do this while no one was in my room!

In Talking Heads Pinker discusses how a computer could never take the place of a human in conversation. Our ability to turn our thoughts into words is unmatched. There is no way to recreate it. I am amazed at the brain and its ability to comprehend and produce language. I also was impressed by Pinker’s statement that the time between when a speaker says something and when a listener understands is only half a second!

The brain’s abilities continue to amaze me! Once again, I have learned about another part of life that we take for granted, the immense capacity in our brains for language and how much the simple act of conversation contains.