The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Library Edition

from joyharmon

Helped me to understand how language is learned and in this sense has been very helpful in my teaching of ESL students. A bit complex, but worth the time spent to read and understand it. The benefit is in understanding. You have to find your own way to apply it. But unlike many book on educationa...

from psiloiordinary

This guy is very clever. He is even cleverer at explaining the clever things he thinks about in such a clever way that you don't need to be nearly as clever as him to get to drips with them. I confess to getting completely lost in the grammar discussions and skipping forwards a little. But even t...

from dmsteyn

A highly readable account on how language is an inherent characteristic of the human species, which I found a bit unpleasant to read at times. Pinker is such a good writer that I feel a little inadequate in responding to his book, but that aside, I thought it was an erudite book on a complex topi...

from co_coyote

This is a book I gave to my oldest son one Christmas when he was in love with language and it looked like he was heading down the path to becoming a linguist. He went back to school before I could steal the book off his bookshelf to read it, so when I found it on his bookshelf in Seattle I was ov...

from Move_and_Merge

I don't much care for Pinker and find it daunting that he's somehow attained "celebrity" status in cognitive science. Was it with books like this that he did so? This basically reads like an extended defense of Chomsky's universal grammar (UG) and Fodor's language of thought (LOT) hypothesis (per...