It might be that I worked with handicapped kids once in my early
20s for about a year that makes me doubt the automatic-ness of
it. Or, Being 1/2 deaf (more like 3/4) from birth and horrible
vision that didn't get glasses 'til I was 7 I think, my brain
has to do a LOT of conscious processing. I remember conscious
processing even when I was 3.5/4 yrs old, making spider webs out
of pieces of ham at the cerebral palsy center with my buddy
Alan, who had one thumb for a hand and a claw-like thing for the
other. I have a very strong memory that goes WAY back, with a
few misty areas of course. I didn't speak a language anybody but
my 1.5 yr older sister understood until I was 2.5 or 3 and *had
to* say something to my mother, because my sister wasn't there
with me to translate. My first intelligible sentence was "Where
Lin-Lin?" It was a cold fall day and we were standing by the car
as I was waiting to go in, looking around for her. I also don't
know if her translations were correct either; she could've been
faking it because she wanted a cookie and would say, "He wants a
cookie". This doesn't mean that Chomsky was wrong about the
"Language Center" but afaik, CogSci hasn't found it. Chomsky had
some great ideas besides this one, but he wasn't a good
cognitive psychologist. He was analogizing to the latest
technology available at the time, which was the mainframe
computes, and they believed very heavily in AI and modeled his
ideas about humans off of the latest tech. Things that are
easy for people who follow normal development patterns weren't
all easy for me, and I didn't have it as bad as some do. If
something was truly innate, primal, universal, instinct, it
can't have exceptions.
