Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, studied experimental psychology at McGill University and Harvard University. After serving on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford universities he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology. Pinker has studied many aspects of language and of visual cognition, with a focus on language acquisition in children. He is a fellow of several scientific societies, and has been awarded research prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, graduate and undergraduate teaching prizes from MIT, and book prizes from the American Psychological Association, the Linguistics Society of America and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Language Instinct, available in Penguin, and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.