language development

Question 1

who argued nurture

Answer 1

• Skinner argued the nurture position
 Emphasising the role of the environment
 Children ‘learn’ language by imitating/learning rules
 e.g. Social/linguistic environment and learning

Question 2

who argued nature

Answer 2

• Chomsky argued the nature position
 Emphasising the role of innate ‘within’ child factors
 Children ‘develop’ language
 e.g. Genetic factors – ‘maturation’, ‘unfolding’

Question 3

 Epigenetic principles

Answer 3

development through interaction of genes and their environment

Epigenesis – genes and environment interacting.

Question 4

An instinct for language?

Answer 4

Pinker (1994)

 The universality of language
 Pidgins and creoles
 ‘poverty of the input’ (poverty of the stimulus – POTS)
 Commonality of grammatical forms across languages
 Brain structure and function

Question 5

1) The universality of language

Answer 5

• We suspect language is innate because…… all humans have it

 Linguistic sophistication does not vary from culture to culture – ‘isolated’ cultures do not have less well developed language
 A language-less culture has never been discovered
 No evidence that language spread from one culture to others…
 …languages evolved in parallel

Question 6

Gardner and Gardner, 1969

Answer 6

No amount of ‘environmental input’ produces ‘language’ in other species

• He’s saying that humans are built this way…
 Language evolved just like walking upright and opposable thumbs
• BUT – not everything that is universal is innate…

Question 7

Pidgin

Answer 7

a non-grammatical language developed by adults who do not share a common language

Question 8

Creole

Answer 8

fully grammatical language developed out of a pidgin

Question 9

2) Pidgins and Creoles

Answer 9

 Sugar plantations in Hawaii – early 20th Cent.
 Migrant workers develop a ‘pidgin’
 Children develop a ‘creole’
 They couldn’t help develop a grammatical language, even though exposed to a non-grammatical one in childhood
 Similarly - deaf children of hearing parents – parents develop ‘pidgin’ signing; children develop ‘sign language’

Question 10

Zebra finch study

Answer 10

• Chicks imitate their father’s song
 Of course imitation is part of language development!
• Male chicks isolated from adult song
• ‘isolates’ develop distorted version
• Isolates mate with females
• Subsequent generations only exposed to their fathers’ (distorted) song
• Within four generations original zebra finch song re-created – without ever having been heard
• An innate ‘template’ or ‘blueprint’?

Question 11

Reinventing language

Answer 11

“Children actually reinvent [language] generation after generation – not because they are taught to, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can’t help it” (Pinker, 1994, p. 32).

Question 12

3) ‘Poverty of the input’

Answer 12

• Nurture: children learn language by imitating and by learning the ‘grammatical’ rules of their language

• Nature: No….
 The environment does not supply enough data for the child to learn a grammatically well formed language
 Children produce language they have never heard and which use rules that they could not derive (from what they hear)
 e.g. formulate grammatically correct questions that they have never heard, from a rule they are unlikely to have learnt

Question 13

Linguists love examples like the following…

Answer 13

Producing novel forms

• A unicorn is in the garden
• A unicorn that is eating a flower is in the garden
• Children are unlikely to have heard the correct construction, but they get it right
• If they have learnt ‘rules’ then one might expect ‘rule-based’ errors (e.g. following a simpler rule, incorrectly)
• An innate grasp of the ‘deep structure’ of language

Question 14

4) Commonality of grammar

Answer 14

• Many languages create questions by moving aux. verb to beginning of sentence
 The dog is in the garden. Is a dog in the garden?
 Theoretically limitless ways of doing this
• So why do many languages have similar structures, when they evolved in parallel?
 “It is as if isolated inventors miraculously came up with identical standards for typewriter keyboards or morse code or traffic signals” (Pinker, 1994, p. 43)
• Keyboards have a similar structure because they originated in one place & spread…

Question 15

5) Brain structure and function

Answer 15

• There is “an identifiable seat [for language] in the brain, and perhaps even a special set of genes that help wire it into place” (Pinker, 1994, p. 45).

Question 16

Nurture – ‘Learning’ language

Answer 16

 ‘Poverty of the input’ does not mean no input
 Children learn a specific language, according to their linguistic environment
 Language will not develop in a social vacuum
 Koluchová (1972); Zebra finches
 you have to be in interaction with someone to use language!

Question 17

Language development also requires a language environment

Answer 17

But how does the language environment work together with innate factors to produce ‘language development’?

Question 18

Infants tuned into prosody…

Answer 18

• The physical characteristics of speech
 Pitch, intonation, rhythm…
• It seems that babies are tuned into the prosodic features of speech

Question 19

Mehler et al. (1988)

Answer 19

 4-day olds discriminate between mother tongue and foreign language
 Replicated with speech low-pass filtered at 400 Hz. which preserves prosody (Christophe and Morton, 1998)

Question 20

 Condon and Sander (1974)

Answer 20

 Babies tuned into speech – not just any sounds.

Question 21

Prosody tuned into the infant…

Answer 21

• The physical structure of the language environment is systematically ‘geared’ to the infant’s needs
 e.g. Fernald (1985) shows how the language environment might fit the baby (preference for ‘motherese’)
 Motherese is a feature of a baby’s linguistic environment that is well suited to its needs
 In other words: the environment ‘delivers’ language to babies in a way that ‘suits’ them