Universal+Grammars

Regardless of culture, race, environment, geographical location, parental verbal skills or attention, children the world over go through the same steps at the same age in learning language. Unlike reading and writing, the ability to talk and understand speech is innate and requires no formal training. One is born with the ability to talk, as well as the ability to see, hear, feel, and so on.

On the other hand, just as one must be exposed to light or he will lose the ability to see complex forms, one must be exposed to language or he will lose the ability to talk or understand human speech. It is argued that all human beings are endowed with an innate ability to acquire language as they born able to speak in the same fashion, albeit according to the tongue of their culture, environment and parents. They possess all the rules which govern how language is spoken and they process and express language in accordance with these innate temporal-sequential motoric rules which we know as grammar.

Because they possess this structure, which in turn is imposed by the structure of our nervous system, children are able to learn language even when what they hear falls outside this structure and is filled with errors. They tend to produce grammatically correct speech sequences, even when those around them fail to do so. They disregard errors because they are not processed by their nervous system which acts to either impose order even where there is none, or to alter or delete the message altogether. It is because humans possess these same Wernicke-inferior parietal lobe "deep structures" that speakers are also able to realize generally when a sentence is spoken in a grammatically incorrect fashion.

It is also because apes, monkeys, and dogs and cats do not possess these deep structures that they are unable to speak or produce grammatically complex sequences or gestures. Their sounds do not become punctuated by temporal-sequential gestures imposed by the Language Axis.