Pinker 
Pinker, Steven
Nature-nurture in 50's and 60's
The nature-nurture debate (1955 – present day). Between the mid 1950s and the early 1980s one of the main debates that dominated psychology was nature-nurture. The crux of the nature-nurture debate was the degree to which human attributes, particularly intelligence and personality, were determined by either genetic factors (nature) or environmental factors (nurture). This nature-nurture debate was particularly fierce in the area of intelligence, following the publication, and subsequent criticism, of Sir Cyril Burt's results from his study of the intelligence quotients (IQ) of separated twins. Over many years Burt claimed to have studied 58 pairs of monozygotic (MZ – from the same ovum) twins (popularly referred to as 'identical'). This was a larger number than any other researcher had been able to obtain. For that reason, Burt's claims that the IQs of separated MZ twins were more alike than those of dizygotic (DZ – 'non-identical') twins reared together was very influential in supporting claims that intelligence is largely inherited. However, it was later alleged that Burt at worst fabricated his results, and at best behaved in a 'dishonest manner' because he did not find as many separated twins as he had claimed. The debunking of Burt's results even became the leading article on the front cover of an issue of the Sunday Times in 1976 and Burt was posthumously discredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). The nature-nurture debate over intelligence generated a public debate between a leading hereditarian (someone who believes that intelligence is largely inherited) – Hans Eysenck – and the environmentalist who had first uncovered problems in Burt's reported statistics (Leon Kamin). This was published in 1981 in a book titled Intelligence: the battle for the mind. The debate has rumbled on since with publications such as The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) and with various defences of Burt's conclusions and data. Few psychologists now argue for only one side of the nature-nurture debate. This is partly because most now accept that both genetic inheritance and environment play some part in all human psychological processes. The successful mapping of human genes in the Human Genome project has contributed new evidence to discussions of the heritability of psychological characteristics. However, the debate in psychology is now more one of the relative contributions of nature and nurture, and the specific mechanisms of interaction, than one of absolute dichotomies. Written by: Course Team
Psycholinguistics
Developmental psycholinguistics. This research method focuses on empirical study of the processes and stages involved in the development of language in children. Despite the great complexity of language, virtually all children quickly and easily reach high levels of skill in language use. Studying how children are able to do this is not only interesting for linguists learning about the structure of language, but also for psychologists trying to understand the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and use of language.
I have looked at how children learn them (including why they make errors like breaked and comed, which could not have been memorized by parents), how they change over the centuries, how they work in different languages, where they are computed in the brain, and how they give rise to linguistic puzzles, such as the fact that no one knows the plural of Walkman and that English teachers frown on Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay and Eric Clapton's Lay Down Sally. This work was summarized in my popular science book Words and Rules.
During that time I have worked on a theory of how children acquire their mother tongue (published in my 1984 book Language Learnability and Language Development), and on how people learn and use verbs (published in a 1989 book).
My doctoral dissertation was on mental images of three-dimensional space, but I also studied with Ro ger Brown, one of the first psychologists in the modern era to study language development in children.
I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1954, to a secular but culturally observant Jewish family, son of a clothing salesman and a homemaker (both would go on to other careers when I went to college).
Both used the framework of evolutionary psychology, which treats the mind as a computational system that evolved to solve the kinds of problems faced by our foraging ancestors.
Written by: Stephen Pinker
In 1979 I received my PhD and did a postdoctoral fellowship down the road at the Massachusetts Insti tute of Technology (MIT), where I worked with Joan Bresnan, a brilliant linguist.
I studied Social Science at Dawson College, a two-year course in Montreal, before earning a Bachelo r's degree in psychology at McGill University, also in Montreal. As an undergraduate I was obsessed with all aspects of psychology, and did research on memory, auditory pattern recognition (with Al Bregman), social psychology, and behavioural psychology.
Around that time I embarked on a new research topic that I have pursued ever since: understanding th e interaction between memory and computation in language by studying every aspect of regular and irregular verbs.
I also chatted now and again with Noam Chomsky, the scholar who revolutionized linguistics in the late 1950s and who shocked the behaviourist establishment by claiming that language was an innate faculty of the human mind.
Regular verbs like walk-walked are predictable and can be computed by a rule ('add –ed'); irregular verbs like come-came and take-took are idiosyncratic and must be memorized.
I teach Introductory Psychology at MIT, and also write integrative books for a wide audience. The Language Instinct explained everything you always wanted to know about language, and How the Mind Works presented a unified account of the human mind.
I entered the psychology department at Harvard University in 1976, a low point for the job prospects of academics, but I had confidence that the field I chose, cognitive psychology, would expand.
After spending a year apiece at Harvard and Stanford, I returned to MIT's psychology department (now the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) in 1982, where I have remained ever since.
Otherwise they are matched on meaning and length, so they are an ideal way to disentangle the mental grammar (rules that combine words or bits of words) and the mental lexicon (the repository of stored information about words in memory).
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