Environmental and Biological Influences of the Acquisition of Language
Introduction
-Language is universal in the species just because the capacity to learn it is innately given -Some capacity of language must be innate but at the same time, it is equally clear that language is learned.
-Language acquisition in humans seems to involve a type of learning that is heavily constrained, or predisposed to follow certain limited courses, by our biology.
-Languages are not fully innate, they are a product of biology and linguistic input
Descartes’s Perspective on Human Language
“It is a very remarkable fact that there are none…without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same.”
Evidence for the Biology in Languages
- language learning proceeds uniformly within and across linguistic communities despite extensive variability of the input provided to individuals
- the child acquires many linguistic generalizations that experience could not have made available
Milestones of Normal Development
-Isolated words appear at about one year of age
-At the beginning, the subject precedes the verb Plike “Mommy throw” instead of “Throw ball”)
-Between the ages of 2 and 5, complex multiclausal sentences appear with morphemes
Pprepositions, articles, etc.)
-By age 5 or before, they sound like adults speaking.
Lenneberg’s Argument
-These uniformities in the course of learning for children exposed to different languages are indicators that language learning has a significant biological basis
Counterargument to Lenneberg’s Argument
-It is not just a biological basis. Children may go through regular stages through time and exposure and from hearing adult’s talk around them.
Variation in Motherese:
-Mothers talk differently to their children than they do to adults.
-Simplified speech, called Motherese, may play a causal role in the language-learning process for children.
-Mothers speak in whole sentences even to youngest learners.
-The child’s first sentences are mostly declaratives like “Mommy throw ball”
-Newport’s study: the children’s learning rate was largely unaffected by differences in their mother’s speech
Herodotus’ Old Experiment
-The Egyptian King Psammetichus placed two infants in an isolated cabin.
-Men would feed them but were not to speak to them.
-He wanted to see whether they would start speaking Egyptian or Phrygian all on their own without any environmental help.
-When they were children, instead of speaking Egyptian, they reinvented their own language of Phrygian – the original innate language, which suggests that language is biologically innate.
Language Invention by the Isolated Deaf Child
-Around the ages of 1-4, just like hearing children, the deaf produce signals and symbols to communicate
-At age 2, the deaf sequence their gestures in two to three sign sentences
-When the environment provides no language samples, children have the internal ability to create their own forms to render the same meanings
Language Development in the Blind Child
-There is neither delay nor distortion in their language growth
-They acquire the same words at the same maturational moments as do sighted children
-When describing visual stimuli, blind children use their hands
-Significant aspects of language development are dictated by our biology
Deprivation of First Language Exposure Until Late in Life:
Isabelle:
-Isabelle was hidden away in an attic by a deranged mother, apparently never spoken to at all and provided with only minimal attention necessary to sustain her life
-She was discovered at age 6 – her cognitive development was below a normal 2 year old and she could not speak any language.
-But, within a year she learned to speak at the level of her 7 year old peers, her intelligence was normal and she went to school.
-Findings argue that maturational level, not extent of opportunities for practice, is the chief limiting factor in language growth
-Isabelle’s case illustrates that learning can begin late in maturational time and have the same outcome of native-level fluency
Genie
-Genie was discovered in California at 13 years old in horrible circumstances
-From 20 months, she was beaten, tied to a chair in a dark room, and never spoken to -Despite intensive rehabilitation, Genie’s language abilities never approached normality -She did acquire vocabulary items and spoke like 2 year olds do, but never went beyond that.
Chelsea
-Chelsea was born deaf and mistakenly diagnosed as retarded or emotionally disturbed
-She was found at age 31 and was just merely deaf – once rehabilitated, she had normal hearing -However, like Genie, Chelsea never fully developed grammatical structure or word acquisition more than a child
Why did Genie and Chelsea not progress to full language knowledge while Isabelle did? -The crucial factor is the age at which exposure to linguistic stimulation began -Age 6 is late, but not too late to regain language.
-Whereas age 13 and 31 is too late by far.
-This shows that there is a critical period for language acquisition, a consequence of maturational changes in the developing human brain
Birdsong
-Male birdsong is innate but in other species the song is partially acquired or modified through exposure
-For white-crowned sparrows, the baby birds must hear an adult song sometime between the seventh and sixtieth days of life. If exposure comes later on, it will have no ability to produce the song and it will never sing normally.
Second Language Learning
-In the first stages of learning a second language, adults appear to be more efficient than children -But the long-range outcome is the reverse: after a few years, very young children speak the new language fluently and sound just like natives. This is uncommon in adults.
Newport and Johnson’s Study on Native Chinese and Korean Speakers
-The subjects had just arrived in the USA and were immersed in English at varying ages
-After 5 years, they were tested on their English-language knowledge
-Results: learners who were exposed to English before the age of 7 performed just like native speakers, whereas after that age, there was an increasing decrement in performance -The later they were exposed to English, the worse they performed.
Late Exposure to a First Language:
-Newport studied the production and comprehension of American Sign Language PASL) in congenitally deaf people
-All of them had been using that system for 30 years, all subjects were 50 years old when tested – the only difference was the age they started it at.
-The first group: the deaf had been exposed to ASL since birth
-The second group: the deaf had been early learners for ASL between age 4 and 6
-The third group: the deaf had come in contact with ASL after the age of 12
-Findings: Only those who had been exposed to ASL before the age of 6 showed native-level fluency
Pidgins and Creoles:
Pidgin:
-a rough-and-ready contact language, a lingua franca
-basic in form
-most speakers are later learners
-the sentences are one clause each and have a rigid simple structure and few, if any, function words
-pidgin can develop into a full language, ex: Creole
-ex: the individuals who learned ASL at a late age is considered to be a language like a pidgin Pbasic)
Creole
-once a pidgin language has native speakers, it is called a creole
-it undergoes rapid changes: multiclausal sentences and function morphemes
Simon the ASL fast learner
-When two late learners marry, their children are therefore like creole speakers
-Simon was a child of two deaf parents who was taught ASL and he learned and surpassed his parents’ understanding of it.
-Between the age of 4 to 7, he refined, expanded and grammaticized the resources of his input, creating an elaborated language complete with complex sentences and function elements
Every Learner is an Isolate
-The category or concept is never directly encountered; learners are thrown upon their own internal resources to discover the category itself
-ex: they must figure out that the word “dog” means dog; the word “know,” etc.
-It seems that the word learner is isolated from direct information about word meanings, even under optimal environmental conditions
-It must be that the categories are largely imprinted in the human mind
Noah Chomsky’s English Structure in Sentences
-In simple English declarative sentences, the verb occurs after the subject noun phrase; ex: “the man is a fool”
-To form the interrogative, you add “is” preceding the subject; Ex: “Is the man a fool?” -The analysis of utterances required for forming the correct generalization is not offered in the language input that the child receives
-Children learn the structure of the English language as structure-dependent rather than serialorder-dependent
Summary:
-Every real learner is isolated form many of the kinds of elaborate information necessary to produce grammatical information and word meanings -Innate principles must be guiding their linguistic development
-Children can learn language because they are disposed by nature to represent and manipulate linguistic data in highly circumscribed ways -Language is the product of the young human brain
-Language acquisition is therefore a complex interaction between the child’s innate capacities and the social, cognitive, and linguistic supports provided in the environment Pcombination of nature and nurture)