Books like The Language Instinct ("Daily Telegraph" Talking Science) by Steven Pinker

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker explores how language shapes our cognition and society, revealing the hidden links between words, emotions, and culture.

Steven Pinker’s acclaimed book offers an erudite exploration of the human mind, tracing its computational and evolutionary roots while examining how we see, think, feel, interact, and pursue art, religion, and philosophy.

Noam Chomsky argues that a biologically built universal grammar underlies all human languages, exploring its rules, representations, and the possible existence of similar grammars in perception, art, science, and the unconscious.

In this influential study, Steven Pinker develops a new approach to the problem of language learning. Now reprinted with new commentary by the author, this classic work continues to be an indispensable resource in developmental psycholinguistics. - Publisher.

Explores how our brain stores language in unconscious patterns—‘mental grammar’—and how innate Universal Grammar, genetic and environmental factors, and comparable brain specializations shape language, perception, music, and social cognition.

This book explores the mechanics of language, how we acquire speech, why languages evolve, and the quirks and irregularities they display.

David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage.In Gesture and Thought, the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought.Gesture and Thought is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought.