  Clearly, there is something very special about the brains of human  beings that enables them to master a natural language — a feat  usually more or less completed by age 8 or so. §2.1 of this  article introduces the idea, most closely associated with the work of the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, that what is special about human  brains is that they contain a specialized ‘language  organ,’ an innate mental ‘module’ or  ‘faculty,’ that is dedicated to the task of mastering a  language.