Steven Pinker Quotes

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.

I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

Girls enjoy complex social interaction. Their verbal skills - and their delight in using them - develop earlier than boys'.

It is the parent's job to see how their child learns and to make sure that the children's self confidence is buoyed at all times, or they will plummet like a stone.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Having a larger vocabulary the day you walk into kindergarten is advantageous.

To acquire behavior, the student must engage in behavior

Many people must have noticed the intense attention given by children to the conversation of grown-ups when they cannot possibly be understanding a word of what they hear. They are trying to get hold of words, and they often demonstrate this fact by repeating joyously some word which they have been able to grasp.

If you can't hear language, you won't be able to understand language and experience normal development. Every minute spent without hearing is a minute a child is not getting back.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.