Critical Review



Critical Review

Acquiring the Human Language: Playing the Language Game

Jack Yates

Introduction to Spanish Linguistics

This video poses the question: How does a child learn his/her native language? ... Or is it learned? The linguist Noam Chomsky states that for the most part, language is not learned, it is innate. What is the basis for this claim? The basic idea is that the child acquires language rapidly, with little evidence that is quite incomplete, degraded and insufficient for supporting the linguistic structures that the child quickly acquires.

These problems are exacerbated by another problem: Chomsky and other linguists believe that the words of a sentence are not ordered like beads on a string or through association. Rather, there is a system of rules that govern the order of (and the relations among) the words. But this system is hidden. It doesn’t appear in the environment of the child, and the parents and others around the child cannot talk about the rules, because although they use them in their speech, they are not conscious of them. Therefore, the question is how does the child learn these hidden rules so rapidly?

Moreover, there are specific arguments that are used by the linguists that favor the nativist position for language acquisition. They are:

1. The difficulty children show in imitating, and the claim that imitation is insufficient for learning a language;

2. The impossibility that parents teach the child because they cannot express the rules even though they know them;

3. The insufficiency of extension and analogy for explaining the acquisition (instead of hidden rules);

4. The poverty of evidence received by the child regarding the rules and the hidden structure of language;

5. The similarity of languages throughout the world when their isolation should produce divergence;

6. The errors that children make and do NOT make;

7. The complexity of language in the child at an early age;

8. The creativity of language: children say novel sentences, and

9. The learning of language: it doesn’t appear to be learned like other skills

Each of these points is discussed below.

Many people believe that children learn language through imitating adults. For 2 reasons, this is not likely. First, children make new sentences frequently. Therefore imitation is not completely sufficient. Second, before a person knows a language, it is very difficult to imitate it. There are many anecdotes that demonstrate this. In our class [linguistics class] at the beginning of the semester, we saw a video in which a man tried to get a little girl to say “I want a cookie, please.” But the child never understood what was wanted (even after many attempts) and never said the complete sentence. For example, she repeated “I want a cookie” at which point the man would say, “Say please” and she would say “please”. Then the man would say, “No, I want you to say the whole thing. Say ‘I want a cookie, please.” This was a lesson in politeness, not grammar, but the child never understood the point and never imitated the whole sentence, even though she was perfectly capable of saying it. Like most children, she assumed the man was trying to communicate something substantive, not playing a game of imitation!

In fact, it is difficult to imitate any activity, if one doesn’t already have the skill. Try this observation. Watch a dance that you do not know... or a game or some other activity that you don’t know (or listen to a language that you don’t know!), then try to imitate it. You will find that it is not easy. I am certain that you will feel quite confused!

The errors that children make are more evidence that the language is not acquired through imitation. Children are proficient at finding and applying rules. For example many children say “gooses” and “foots”, which indicate that they are not imitating adults but rather have discovered a rule.

As with imitation, may people believe that adults teach children language. For example, one points with the finger and says, “Johnny, this is a dog, this is a cat...”. For words, parents actually do this, and perhaps children learn words in this way. But this warm family fantasy ignores the problem of teaching the hidden system of rules. Spanish speakers know the phonemic and morphophonemic rules that we have discussed in class. English speakers know the rule for forming plural nouns in English. But no one (except linguists!) can explain these rules to someone else. They are unconscious. Therefore, adults cannot teach the rules directly, nor can they present the evidence for them in a systematic manner, for example in a sequence of sentences (as opposed to learning for example mathematics in a series of sequenced classes; or a musical instrument, in which the student begins with “Playing the Clarinet: Book One”). This is part of the reason that Chomsky says that the child receives little evidence for making deductions about the rules of his language.

But don’t the parents have some role in teaching their children language? The video declares that when the mother simplifies her speech in order to help the child, he ignores her! And although some mothers correct their children, others do not. Corrections do not appear necessary for language learning, and often corrections are ignored by children when they are offered. There are many anecdotes where children explicitly reject the correction, as in a child speaking to his mother, “No, it is NOT ran, it is RUNNED!”

But perhaps the child does not acquire rules at all, but follows the patterns of her language. Perhaps the child observes the frequencies of various grammatical patterns, and uses them as a guide in order to produce sentences without rules. The video refutes this hypothesis with the following patterns:

I painted a red barn = I painted a barn red

I saw a red barn /= *I saw a barn red

John ate a sandwich : John ate.

John grows tomatoes : *John grows

What did you eat your eggs with? : *What did you eat your eggs and?

Children never follow the very tempting pattern by saying the starred sentences. These are the errors that children do NOT make.

Moreover, Steven Pinker (when he gave a presentation on campus) said that in German there are classes of verbs for which the majority are irregular. But when in an experiment speakers are asked to conjugate possible but nonexistent verbs from these classes (as you might be asked to state the past tense of “wug”), they conjugate them as regular verbs of the class; they do not follow the pattern most frequently used in the language.

Are languages of the world similar? If so, it indicates that there are biological restrictions in the evolution of language. If not, then we should find languages transformed into unrecognizable forms because no restrictions apply. The case of the languages of Papua New Guinea offers evidence that all languages are similar. Isolated for many epochs, nevertheless these languages have many traits in common with other languages of the world. Also, they offer evidence that there is no such thing as a primitive language. In one culture studied, there is no writing, no wheel, but the language is undeniably complex. Each verb has 2-3 thousand forms, and the language uses 14 versions of future tense!

Other facts indicate that the acquisition of language is a biological development. Deaf Children develop language at the same time and in the same way as other children. The deaf children learn their first word and first syntax at the same age as others, and they make errors analogous to “gooses” and “foots”. Also, evidence indicates that deaf infants babble with their hands at the age when normal babies babble orally. This indicates that language development does not depend on the sense of hearing but rather emerges in whatever manner possible and in whatever sensory channel possible. In the video Jerry Fodor compares the learning of language to walking or having hair: these are highly biological “skills”.

The complexity of child language at a young age appears to be a miracle. In the video it is said that a child of three years cannot do multiplication, division, or subtraction, but is nevertheless a member of a linguistic community. This child cannot tie her shoes, but is nearly equal to an adult in language functioning (except for vocabulary size). The psychologist Jill de Villiers demonstrates this in a clever experiment. Consider the following sentence:

When did the boy say (how) he hurt himself?

Without the word “how”and in the context of a boy who climbed a tree, then saw a bruise on his arm when he was bathing, the sentence is ambiguous. Two answers are possible:

... when he climbed the tree.

... when taking a bath.

But with the word in parentheses included the first answer is blocked. This fact is very subtle and never taught by adults, but children of 3-4 years know the possible correct answers in both cases. How can this pattern be learned so rapidly? How can children rapidly learn 2-3 thousand forms of the verbs in a language of Papua New Guinea? Children do not appear to learn the language like they acquire other skills, for example riding a bicycle, or playing a musical instrument. The child cannot drive a car or vote in elections, but in 3-4 years he has acquired a language, WITHOUT much correction, WITHOUT formal lessons, and making few errors along the way. It is a miracle.

For these reasons, Chomsky proposes that the human child is born with a prototypical language, or a universal grammar. It consists in (for example) a set of possible grammatical categories, such as word, syllable, phoneme (possibly even the set of possible phonemes), noun, verb, adjective, etc., and other basic ideas or distinctions such as tense, plural, gender, etc. The child is ready to search for words (in the continuous stream of sound), for the order of the words in a sentence, and for affixes. Thus prepared, the child begins to learn the vocabulary, the phonemes, and the specific grammatical rules of her language. I think that this is a very clever idea... it makes good sense and seems extreme only if one insists on a dustbowl empiricism.

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