Voices en Español

When a baby begins to talk, everyone laughs and says “how cute” whenever the baby makes a mistake. But in “The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World,” Charles Yang, posits the theory that those “mistakes” may be anything but mistakes. In fact, he writes that these “errors” could be perfectly correct grammatical structures in other languages. Dr. Yang, who teaches linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, theorizes that we learn our native languages in part by “unlearning the grammars of all the rest.”

Here’s an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “That Isn’t Baby Talk You Hear”:

The idea builds on Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, the seminal idea in linguistics. In 1957, Prof. Chomsky asserted that basic knowledge of how language works — that it is made of words, has nouns and verbs, and has rules to move words around (You are here to Are you here?) — is innate and resides ultimately in our genes.
 Because every child, no matter her DNA, easily learns the language she was born into (“easily” relative to the effort needed to learn a second language as an adult, that is), universal grammar must be general enough to work for any tongue. That means each of the world’s 6,000 or so living languages is just a variation on the theme.

“Only the grammar actually used in the child’s linguistic environment will not be contradicted, and only the fittest survives,” Prof. Yang writes. “Children learn a language by unlearning all other possible languages.

Want to read more? You can find the book in the Voices Amazon store. It’s listed at the bottom of that page.