About this Video

• Video Title: Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain | Big Think
• Channel: Big Think
• Speakers: Steven Pinker
• Duration: 00:50:01

Introduction

This Big Think video features Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, discussing language as a window into the human mind. He explores the nature of language, its acquisition by children, and its processing in the brain, contrasting it with related but distinct concepts like writing, prescriptive grammar, and thought itself.

Key Takeaways

• Language's Uniqueness: Language is a uniquely human trait, crucial for cooperation and knowledge sharing. It's a complex system with scientific mysteries surrounding its evolution and brain computation.
• Language vs. Writing/Grammar/Thought: Pinker clarifies the differences between language and written language (a recent invention), prescriptive grammar (often illogical rules), and thought (which can exist independently of language).
• How Language Works: Language comprises three components: a mental lexicon (words), grammar (rules for assembling words), and interfaces for production and comprehension.
• Grammar's Creativity: Chomsky's work highlights language's open-ended creativity, explained by internalized grammar rules allowing for infinite sentence combinations. Phrase structure rules are key to understanding sentence meaning.
• Language Acquisition: Children don't simply memorize sentences but internalize grammatical rules, evident in their early speech. The "poverty of the input" argument suggests innate knowledge ("universal grammar") assists language acquisition.
• Challenges of Speech Comprehension: Speech comprehension is computationally complex, highlighted by difficulties in speech-to-text technology. Co-articulation (sound variation) and the absence of segmentation in speech waveforms pose significant challenges.
• Pragmatics and Context: Pragmatics involves understanding language in context using world knowledge and communicative expectations. This crucial aspect of language comprehension is difficult to program into computers.