Everybody's talkin': Language's great innate debate continues to make noise

The chorus of a popular song from nearly 30 years ago proclaims "Everybody's talkin' at me, I can't hear a word they're sayin', only the echoes of my mind." A vocally precocious but otherwise typical baby might paraphrase those sentiments as follows: "Everybody's talkin' at me, I hear every word they're sayin', it's all echoing through my mind. And if someone doesn't take care of this diaper and give me some milk, I'll scream!" Okay, babies don't talk, and their song lyrics consist of incessant babbling. Nonetheless, young children move from a conversational crawl to linguistic leaps in a matter of months, typically beginning sometime between their first and second birthdays. A burgeoning number of studies indicates that language learning begins long before infants utter their first words, probably within the womb upon hearing their mother's voice. Several factors have rekindled the debate over how people learn to talk. Researchers have increasing respect for infants' talent for soaking up language, and there is growing evidence of the brain's facility for reorganizing itself in light of new experiences. Moreover, computer systems that squeeze knowledge out of simple arrays of processing units are being developed as models of how learning occurs in the brain. "There's a war going on between competing views of the nature of language," says psychologist Mark S. Seidenberg of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "On a deeper level, it's an argument about what innateness means and where knowledge comes from."