The Language of a Child and a Foreigner

Steven Pinker’s essay Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven brings an argument to the table that strengthens Richard Rodriguez’s fight against bilingual education in the excerpt Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood. According to Pinker’s essay, children are born with some understanding of language and these youth fine tune their speech through making an effort to speak it. Pinker writes that “the infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instructional manual” (par. 10). He goes on to explain that the best way for the child to learn to use his or her language is to test it out.

Rodriguez’s point in his essay, it is better for a person to learn a second language by being dropped into the culture fits together with Pinker’s theory of how very small children learn a first language. Rodriguez argues that, according to his and other’s experiences, bilingual education does, in fact, hinder the accommodation of a young person into a new country’s culture. If a person were to apply Pinker’s idea of early childhood language to assimilation into a culture’s language, it would reinforce the idea that immersion and testing work best for acquiring a first or second language.

Infants are immersed in their first language and feel out every aspect of it simply by listening. Children want and need to communicate with adults just as immigrants want and need to communicate with other people in a new culture. Simply out of necessity and an innate sense of language, both children and people living in a new place have the ability for language.