The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, weaves his vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.

Along the way, The Language Instinct lucidly explains the important issues your students need to know about language: how it works, how it evolved, how children learn it, how the brain computes it, and how it chang...