The nature of this machine has been the subject of raging linguistic debate—perhaps kids possess a language machine or perhaps it’s a language + everything else machine—but both sides agree that kids have some sort of awesome, pattern-crunching machine in their heads. Every kid can take in sentences from their parents, chew them up, and automatically spit out perfect grammar by their sixth birthdays. And fortunately for us, the machine in their heads never stops working. If we want to learn a new language, we just need to learn how to use it.
