I have been interested in language acquisition almost as long as I have been a painter...I went down the visual path, and my current work is in activated surfaces and edges. I also think of the structure of a composition in terms of  metre (long-short = wide-narrow) for similar reasons that I understood Dr. Pinker saying he studies verbs: as windows into psyche/way the human mind works; as universal organizing principles (which I think of as pre-linguistic, and not limited to our species, such as ordering and small integer counting and division). Interesting that I found this Idea by searching for 'mathematics'.