“The ultimate issue in linguistic theory is the explanation of how a child can acquire any human language.” Thomas Roeper in Introduction to Hyams (1986). “The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species, just as the capacity to walk, to grasp objects, to recognize faces. We don’t find any serious differences in children growing up in congested urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in privileged suburban villas”, Dan Slobin, The Human Language Series, 1994 (quoted from Fromkin and Rodman).
Pinker 1994:18.The Language Instinct. Pelican.London. Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time…. Instead,it is a distinct piece of biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction,is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons …. I prefer the admittedly quaint term instinct.