The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition - Essay Example

Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar: The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition The acquisition of a language, both a first and a second (or more), involves the development of a system of principles and groups of a particular type. Adults work to learn new languages. However, much of this system exists innately without effort at an early age. More surprisingly, this system develops even though children do not have ability to make judgments about language like adults do. These facts suggest that the human brain contains a mechanism that is available from very early in life. Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential "nativist" theorists, was an advocate of this innate structure he called the "Universal Grammar," which simply means that a universal structure for organizing grammatical rules (as one learns a language) exists in every human being. (Cook, 1988) Language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, logically enough, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of the muscles that produce speech and sensitivity and the acquisition of native phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language. Interestingly, babies achieve these feats before they produce or understand words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language (Kuhl, et al., 1992). Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (see Clark, 1993; Ingram, 1989). Despite the vast differences in language, children's first words are similar all over the planet. About half the words are for objects: food, household items, and people. There are words for actions, motions, and routines. Finally, there are routines used in social interaction, like yes, no, want, hi. Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence (Clark, 1993; Pinker, 1994). And primitive syntax begins, with two-word strings like "all gone, eat more, go out." Once more, children's two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered according to his/her particular grammatical rules. (Pinker, 1984; Ingram, 1989). Between the late two's and mid-three's, children's language blossoms so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday (Ingram, 1989, p. 235; Pinker, 1984). Though many of the young 3-year-old's sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or another, it is because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence. When researchers focus on a single grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it and how often he or she ignores it, the results are very impressive: for just about every rule that has been looked at, three-year olds obey it a majority of the time (Pinker, 1984, 1989; Crain, 1992). Though our ears perk up when we hear errors, more than 90% of the time, the child is on target. Children do not seem to favor any particular kind of language (indeed, it would be puzzling how any kind of language could survive if children did not easily learn it!). They swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, systems of case and agreement, and whatever else their language throws at them. Even grammatical gender, which many adults learning a second language find challenging, presents no problem: children acquiring language like French, German, and Hebrew acquire gender marking quickly, make few errors, and never use the association with maleness and femaleness incorrectly (Levy, 1983). How do we explain children's course of language acquisition -- most importantly, their inevitable and early mastery The nativist position would point to the theory of Universal Grammar, and the evidence it has in its favor is impressive. In general, the study of this universal grammar structure is oriented around the "logical problem of language acquisition," which is concerned with what is needed to develop a "grammar" in response to the input that is available during the early years of life. (Baker & McCarthy, 1981). It proposes that environmental (external) stimuli alone, such as learning, cannot account for language possession. This idea is summarized in the theory of the "Poverty of the Stimulus", that explains the ways in which language is born into an individual. As Baker and McCarthy put it succinctly, The logical problem of language acquisition arises from the assumption that recovery from overgeneralization must depend on corrective feedback. Because corrective feedback is seldom available for grammatical patterns (as opposed to lexical and semantic patterns) it can be shown that language learning from input data is impossible. Therefore, it is argued, the acquisition of grammar constitutes a logical problem and requires the postulation of innate constraints on the form of language. (1981) Lightfoot (1982) explains that "there are no data available to the child that will suffice to establish some rule or principle". The "poverty of the stimulus" phrase refers to the insufficient information obtained from OUTSIDE the individual, thus implying the idea of some sort of "compensating" internal device. An interesting example illustrating this ability to develop language is the creation of the "Creole language" among children of a mixed community of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Puerto Rican parents at the turn of the century. Immigrants of these various communities were "forced" to live together and thus communicate by some sort of hybrid (pidgin) language. A generation later, their children had invented (or come up with) a new language ("Creole"), being a highly developed linguistic system whose structure appeared to be similar among all the children of the community. (Radford, 1997). A logical basis of language would indeed seem to be more than just a possibility. The interesting thing to note about this scenario is that the children had no adults to provide them with corrective feedback, as they were the first generation to speak the developing language. Capable of negotiating with several different languages, the children developed a complex system of communication. Not one child had a background in linguistics, it can be assumed with high probability. Without any negative or even positive feedback from parents, these children borrowed elements from each of the language to form a new language with its own set of rules. What could have aided these children but a universal agreement among them about what made sense to use from each of their languages. Additionally, it is doubtful they sat around discussing the development of the language before they started using it. Rather, they created the language by doing it, and adopted those elements that universally made sense to use from each language. The opposing side would argue that children have parents selectively reinforcing the sounds a child makes according to whether they sound most like human speech, thereby increasing the number of times these sounds are made by infants. Another view within this field is that children learn through imitation. The child picks up words, phrases and sentences directly by imitation and then through reinforcement and generalization the child learns when it is appropriate to use and combine these responses. Even if a parent is not trying to reinforce it intentionally, a child learns that if he or she correctly asks for something than he or she gets it. (Skinner, 1957) On the surface the above ideas seem reasonable, but they have come under a lot of scrutiny. One strong criticism is that the number of specific stimulus response connections that would be necessary to even begin to explain language is so enormous that there would not be enough time to acquire these connections in a whole life time, not to mention a few short years. Another argument is that parents often reward children for grammatically incorrect sentences. In fact, often parents will find it cute and reward the incorrect speech with imitation as reinforcement, but somehow, the child still figures out how to correct that area in time. Many parents take a nostalgic view of their children's speech and feel that it will "work itself out" in time. Indeed, normal human speech has a pattern of melody, timing, and stress called prosody. And motherese directed to young infants has a characteristic, exaggerated prosody of its own: for approving, for prohibiting, for directing attention, and for comforting. Fernald (1992) has shown that these patterns are very widespread across language communities, and may be universal. When given a choice, babies prefer to listen to speech with these properties than to speech intended for adults (Fernald,1992). But they don't imitate them. In other words, they don't imitate the positive feedback. Roger Brown and Camille Hanlon (1970) attempted to test B. F. Skinner's behaviorist claim that language learning depends on parents' reinforcement of children's grammatical behaviors. Using transcripts of naturalistic parent-child dialogue, they divided children's sentences into ones that were grammatically well-formed and ones that contained grammatical errors. They then divided adults' responses to those sentences into ones that expressed some kind of approval (e.g., "yes, that's good") and those that expressed some kind of disapproval. They looked for a correlation, but failed to find one: parents did not express approval or disapproval to their children for whether or not the sentence was grammatically correct (approval depends, instead, on whether the child's utterance was true). Brown and Hanlon also looked at children's well-formed and badly-formed questions, and whether parents seemed to answer them appropriately, as if they understood them, or with non sequiturs. They found parents do not understand their children's well-formed questions better than their badly-formed ones. Further considering the analysis of negative and positive influence, Chomsky also advocated that when analyzing grammatical errors we must ' know ' the grammar of our language so that we can work out the relationship between words in any sentence we hear. By working out these relationships we can decide what the sentence means. For example, we can recognize that the sentence " Ugly ideas dance loudly " is grammatically correct even if it is nonsense, whereas the sentence " ideas loudly ugly dance" is nonsense and ungrammatical. In order to capture all the subtleties and complexities of language, Chomsky has suggested that language has to be analyzed at a number of different levels. (For example, surface and deep structures). Does feed back play any role at all in a child's learning of a first language Many small effects have been documented where changes in information processing abilities affect language development. For example, children selectively pick up information at the ends of words (Slobin, 1973), and at the beginnings and ends of sentences (Newport, et al, 1977), presumably because these are the parts of strings that are best retained in short term memory. Besides, children clearly need some kind of linguistic input to acquire a language. There have been occasional cases in history where children have somehow survived, either by abandonment or abuse. The outcome is always the same: the children, when found, are mute. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to generate concrete speech, words, and grammatical constructions on their own. Children do not, however, need to hear a full-fledged language; as long as they are in a community with other children, and have some source for individual words, they will invent one on their own, often in a single generation. Children who grew up in plantations and slave colonies were often exposed to a crude combination of languages that served as unifying communication for the laborers. But they grew up to speak genuinely new languages, with their own complex grammars. (Bickerton, 1984). Children most definitely do need to hear an existing language to learn that language, of course. Children with Japanese genes do not find Japanese any easier than English, or vice-versa; they learn whichever language they are exposed to. The term "positive evidence" refers to the information available to the child about which strings of words are grammatical sentences of the target language. In conclusion, both the nativist and non-nativist sides have evidence to support their position. Possibly it is true that there is evidence for both a universal grammar and other influences (both positive and negative feedback) as well. However, the existence of a universal grammar does not necessarily mean the non-existence of other influences, but the evidence for reinforcement and correction also cannot disprove the existence of a universal grammar. References Baker, C. L., & McCarthy, J. J. (Eds.). (1981). The logical problem of language acquisition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bickerton, D. (1984) The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173-221 Brown, R., & Hanlon, C. (1970). Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language. New York: Wiley. Clark, E. V. (1993) The lexicon in acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crain, S. (1992) Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Cook, Vivian James. Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell,1988. Driscoll, Marcy Perkins (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Fernald, A. (1992) Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. In Barkow, et al. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingram., D. (1989) First language acquisition: Method, description, and explanation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kuhl, P., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindblom, B. (1992) Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by six months of age. Science, 255, 606-608. Levy, Y. (1983) It's frogs all the way down. Cognition, 15, 75-93. Lightfoot, D.W. (1982) The Language Lottery, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Newport, E., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, E. (1977) Mother I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D. (1973) Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In. C. Ferguson and D. I. Slobin (ed.), Studies in Child Language Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (a) Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct. Penguin: New York,1994. Radford, Andrew. (1997). Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Radford, Andrew. (1990) Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Skinner (1957) "Verbal Behavior." Language 35(1):pp. 26-58. van der Lely, H. (1994)."Canonical linking rules: Forward vs. reverse linking in normally developing and Specifically Language Impaired children." Cognition, 51, 29-72. Read More