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.