Language Acquisition From A Biolinguistic Perspective
Language Acquisition from a Biolinguistic PerspectiveStephen Craina*, Loes Koringb and Rosalind ThorntonaaDepartment of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, AustraliabDepartment of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia*Corresponding author at: Department of Linguistics, Australian Hearing Hub, 16University Avenue, Macquarie University NSW 2109, E-mail address:stephen.crain@mq.edu.au1
AbstractThis paper describes the biolinguistic approach to language acquisition. We contrast thebiolinguistic approach with a usage-based approach. We argue that the biolinguisticapproach is superior because it provides more accurate and more extensivegeneralizations about the properties of human languages, as well as a better account ofhow children acquire human languages. To distinguish between these accounts, wefocus on how child and adult language differ both in sentence production and insentence understanding. We argue that the observed differences resist explanation usingthe cognitive mechanisms that are invoked by the usage-based approach. In contrast,the biolinguistic approach explains the qualitative parametric differences between childand adult language. Explaining how child and adult language differ and demonstratingthat children perceive unity despite apparent diversity are two of the hallmarks of thebiolinguistic approach to language acquisition.Keywords:Biolinguistics; Language Acquisition; Unification; Universal Grammar; Structuredependence; Continuity Assumption; Usage-Based Approach2
1. IntroductionThere are many ways we could start this chapter, but a good place to start is with theModularity Hypothesis. The Modularity Hypothesis supposes that the humanmind/brain is comprised of "separate systems [i.e., the language faculty, visual system,facial recognition module, etc.] with their own properties" (Chomsky, 1988, p. 161).Proposals about the nature of modularity differ in at least two important respects. First,modular systems can be restricted to perceptual processes, or they can be taken to alsoencompass higher-level cognitive abilities, such as language and reasoning. A seconddifference concerns whether modular systems are innate, or become ‘automatized’through experience. Although modularity does not entail the innateness of cognitivesystems (see e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1992), most proponents of modularity advocatesome version of the innateness hypothesis. All advocates of modularity share oneassumption, that of domain-specificity. A module operates on objects in a specificdomain. In the Modularity of Mind (1983, p. 51) Fodor asserts that “ the perceptualsystem for a language comes to be viewed as containing quite an elaborate theory of theobjects in its domain; perhaps a theory couched in the form of a grammar of thelanguage.” The focus of the biolinguistic program is on language as a modularperceptual system. More specifically, the biolinguistic program is concerned with howsentences and their associated meanings are acquired by children, how they are used byboth children and adults, how the system that pairs sentences and their meaningsevolved, and how this system is represented in the mind/brain.There is now considerable empirical evidence that language has the status of amodule. The evidence takes several forms, including the fact that (a) any humanlanguage can be rapidly acquired by any typically-developing child in the absence ofdecisive environmental data, (b) language is unique to humans, (c) language shows3
neurological localization from birth, and (d) language can be selectively impaired inspecial populations including some forms of brain damage and some genetic childhooddisorders, and (e) language acquisition is governed both by a critical period and by amaturational timetable. The present study describes the biolinguistic approach tolanguage acquisition. Chomsky (2007, p. 2) states the task as follows:“In biolinguistic terms, that means discovering the operations that map presenteddata to the I-language attained. Abstractly formulated, it is the problem ofconstructing a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD), the problem of ‘explanatoryadequacy’. With sufficient progress in approaching explanatory adequacy, afurther and deeper task comes to the fore: to transcend explanatory adequacy,asking not just what the mapping principles are, but why language growth isdetermined by these principles rather than innumerable others that can easily beimagined.”One of the most basic observations underpinning the biolinguistic approach tolanguage acquisition is the naturalistic observation that all typically-developingchildren internalize a rich and complex linguistic system in just a few years.Acquisition of language is rapid and effortless for children, according to thebiolinguistic approach, because the acquisition of language builds upon a foundationthat is pre-determined by the biological endowment of the species. The humanbiological endowment for language is called Universal Grammar. Universal Grammaris the initial state of the language acquisition device (LAD). Universal Grammarcontains core principles that are common to all human languages but, in addition, itcontains information about ways in which human languages differ. Information aboutlanguage variation is encoded in parameters. Universal Grammar, then, is a system of4
principles and parameters. Although the principles of Universal Grammar areinviolable, children use triggering experience to set the parameters of UniversalGrammar in order for children to adopt the same parameter values as adult speakers ofthe local language. Before certain parameters are set to the values adopted by the locallanguage, however, the language spoken by children can differ from the languagespoken by adults in the same linguistic community. Such differences are neverthelesshighly circumscribed. Essentially, child language can differ from the language spokenby adults only in ways in which adult languages can differ from each other. This iscalled the Continuity Assumption (Crain, 1991; Pinker, 1994; Crain & Pietroski, 2001).The Continuity Assumption is one of the main topics of this chapter.1.1. Elaborating the usage-based approachThe usage-based approach to language acquisition stands in stark contrast to thebiolinguistic approach. There is nothing approaching the Continuity Assumptionaccording to the usage-based approach. Rather, this approach supposes that childrenaccrue linguistic knowledge in response to environmental input, using domain-generallearning mechanisms, such as analogy and distributional analysis (Lieven & Tomasello,2008; Saxton, 2010). Initially, linguistic knowledge is accrued in a piecemeal fashion.The products of language learning, including the generalizations that older childrenform, consist of ‘shallow’ records of their linguistic experience (see e.g., Pullum andScholtz, 2002). The linguistic system that children internalize consists of constructions(templates, schemas, constructs) (see Goldberg, 2003, 2006). For this reason, manyadvocates of the usage-based approach call themselves constructivists.A basic tenet of the usage-based approach is the claim that more frequentconstructions are mastered earlier in the course of language development than less5
frequent ones (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011; Lieven & Tomasello, 2008). Given thatconstructions are initially acquired piecemeal, children are expected to take aconsiderable time to internalize a system that pairs utterances and meanings in the sameway as adult speakers. Moreover, when children start to form generalizations thatextend beyond their experience, at around 4- to 5-years of age, the generalizations theyform are just instances of a completely general problem of induction. Learning toproject beyond one’s linguistic experience is seen to be just one variant of the problemthat arises for learning all sorts of things (see Cowie, 1999).As noted earlier, one of the main issues we will be concerned with is the natureof the differences between child and adult language. According to the usage-basedaccount, before children have identified the form-function mappings of the locallanguage, they are expected to produce less articulated versions of the constructionsthat are produced by adults, missing certain of the linguistic ingredients that are presentin adult speech. As children take on board more and more constructions, child languageis expected to more closely match that of adults. Therefore the usage-based approachcan be characterized as an “input matching” process. As Lieven and Tomasello (2008,p. 171) remark:“The difference between young children’s inventories and those of adults is oneof degree: many more, initially all, of children’s constructions are either lexicallyspecific or contain relatively low-scope slots. As well as being less schematicthan many adult constructions they are also simpler with fewer parts. And,finally, children’s constructions exist in a less dense network — they are more‘‘island-like’’.”The usage-based approach adopts the view that meaning is use, where “the primary6
psycholinguistic unit of child language acquisition is the utterance, which has as itsfoundation the expression and understanding of communicative intentions” (Tomasello2000, p. 61) What children acquire, then, is a mapping of forms with functions. Theusage-based account purports that, in tandem, form and function also explain howchildren build up relations among constructions. As children progress towards the finalstages of language development, they form abstract semantic relations amongconstructions. The final stage of language development is outlined as follows by Lievenand Tomasello (2008, p. 171):“Finally, the child has to abstract the relations between constructions. Evidencethat this has occurred is that the child is able to transform an utterance in oneconstruction into another construction, for instance a declarative into a whquestion or an active into a passive. This could be done by forming a semanticrepresentation of what the speaker wishes to say, thereby allowing the productionof the other construction. Whether and when the learner actually maps the form—function mappings of one construction to those of the other is an empirically openquestion at the moment. It depends on the metalinguistic expertise and/oreducational level of different speakers.”As this quote indicates, the usage-based approach is open to findings showing thatdifferent people develop different proficiencies in language.1.2. Elaborating the biolinguistic approachIn contrast to the usage-based approach, the biolinguistic approach contendsthat language acquisition is rapid and effortless, because language learners come7
equipped with the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. Children do notacquire constructions one-by-one. Rather children amalgamate even disparate-lookinglinguistic phenomena, where these draw upon the same principles of UniversalGrammar. Principles of Universal Grammar apply within individual languages, tyingclusters of phenomena together. And these same principles apply across languages,tying together similar phenomena in even historically unrelated languages. Unitingphenomena within and across languages requires principles that operate at aconsiderable distance from the surface. On the biolinguistic approach, it is likelytherefore to turn out that what are considered to be different constructions on the usagebased approach draw upon the same principles of Universal Grammar. Becausedisparate-looking phenomena are derived from the same principles, children acquirethese phenomena in concert, rather than piecemeal. This explains why languageacquisition is so rapid and effortless for children, who master even seemingly complexstructures by the age of 3.The biolinguistic approach offers an explicit account of the (limited) ways inwhich child and adult languages can vary. This feature of language acquisition isexplained, in part, by the parameters of Universal Grammar. Just as parametersdetermine, at least in part, how adult languages differ from each other, parameters arealso invoked to explain children’s non-adult linguistic behavior. This is stated as theContinuity Assumption, which maintains that children’s non-adult linguistic behaviorfollows the natural seams of human languages. To cite just an example we will return tolater, some languages require an overt (phonetically realized) copy of a wh-phrase inthe middle of wh-questions. In other languages, inserting an ‘extra’ wh-word renderssuch questions unacceptable, as in What do you think what Bill wants to do? In keepingwith the Continuity Assumption, some English-speaking children initially produce whquestions with an ‘extra’ copy of the wh-word, so children produce questions that are8
acceptable in some languages, but not in the local language (Thornton, 1990). Thefinding that children add structure is consistent with the Continuity Assumption, but itis not consistent with the usage-based approach, which contends that children’s nonadult utterances should be “simpler with fewer parts.”Of course, the omission of linguistic material is also consistent with theContinuity Assumption. For example, it has been well documented that Englishspeaking children sometimes omit entire noun phrases that are required to bephonetically realized by adult speakers. A parade case of this is a stage at whichEnglish-speaking children omit Subject noun phrases (e.g., Hyams, 1986). Althoughmany languages optionally omit Subjects (e.g., Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese), thekinds of omissions children make are unacceptable for adult speakers of English.Again, child English differs from adult English in ways in which adult languages differfrom each other. We will also report the findings of several experimental studiesshowing that children assign non-adult interpretations to certain sentences. Again,cross-linguistic research reveals that children’s non-adult interpretations are licensed inpossible human languages, but not in the language spoken by adult members of thecommunity in which the child is being raised. This position was first formulated inChomsky (1965); see also Pinker (1984) and see Yang (2002) for a formalimplementation of this approach to language learnability.In all of these cases, children’s non-adult linguistic behaviour was theconsequence of the fact that they initially adopt different values of parameters thanthose adopted by adult speakers of the local language. Children’s initial non-adultassignments of parameter values do not impede their language acquisition, however. Ineach case, children’s initial setting of parameters conforms to a learnability mechanismknown as the Subset Principle (Berwick, 1985). This mechanism ensures that childrenhave readily available ‘positive’ evidence informing them that they need to ‘reset’ the9
relevant parameters to the values adopted by the local language. This evidence takes theform of ‘detectable errors,’ i.e., forms or meanings that the child’s grammar cannotgenerate using the child’s current grammar. The fact that child and adult languagediffers in non-trivial respects is not expected to hinder children from rapidly convergingon a grammar that is equivalent to that of adult speakers.It has been shown by advocates of the usage-based approach that children’sproductions represent only a small proportion of all of the possible syntacticcombinations of certain word sequences. According to the usage-based approach, thefinding that children’s sentences are “island-like” reflects the statistical distribution ofsequences of words in the input children encounter (cf. Tomasello, 2003). Even takingthe findings at face value, the conclusion reached by advocates of the usage-basedapproach is unwarranted. The fact that children’s productions lack broader statisticalcoverage, considering all of the syntactic combinations that are logically possible inadult language, does not entail that children’s productions are not rule-governed(Valian et al., 2009; Yang, 2013). In this regard, it is worth pointing out that Valian etal. (2009) empirically demonstrated that child and adult language do not differsignificantly in combinatory diversity. And Yang (2013) has demonstrated that (due toZipf’s law) the observed diversity in children’s productions is more accurately modeledby a rule-based grammar than by models that rely on memorization and recall of wordcombinations.Finally, according to the biolinguistic approach, all typically-developingchildren converge on a linguistic system that is equivalent to that of adult speakers ofthe local language. Because the human faculty for language is viewed as a domainspecific perceptual system (i.e., a module), this approach contends that all childrencome to the task of language acquisition armed with the principles and parameters ofUniversal Grammar. The linguistic abilities of language learners are not expected to10
depend on a person’s level of education, for example. The principles and parameters ofUniversal Grammar explain children’s convergence on the grammar of the locallanguage before the age at which they begin to receive formal education. By 3-yearsold, children are effectively adults in their abilities to produce and understand sentencesthey have never encountered before, to judge the truth or falsity of these sentences, andto discern entailment relations between them (see, e.g., Crain and Thornton, 1998,2015).The sections that follow, report the findings of experimental studies of childlanguage that reveal young children’s knowledge of a rich and complex grammaticalsystem. We chose these studies because they focus on topics that have beeninvestigated both by researchers who adopt the biolinguistic perspective and byresearchers who adopt the usage-based perspective. The findings of these studiestherefore allow us to compare the empirical and explanatory adequacy of bothapproaches to language acquisition. These studies were selected for two other reasons.First, they are experimental investigations of linguistic phenomena that children masterbefore they reach school age, almost without exception.1 Second, they areinvestigations of linguistic structures that children acquire in stages, including stages atwhich children produce non-adult sentences or assign non-adult interpretations tosentences.2. Structure DependenceConsider examples (1) and (2). Example (1) is a Yes/No question, and (2) is itsdeclarative counterpart. On the biolinguistic approach, these two sentences are related.The Yes/No question (2) is transformed from the declarative sentence (1) by a rule.See section 3.2 for a discussion of the finding that children appear to be delayed in theacquisition of one linguistic phenomenon.111
Essentially, the rule moves the copula verb is from its sentence-internal position in (1)to the sentence-initial position in the Yes/No question (2).(1)John is happy(2)Is John happy?Advocates of the usage-based approach “do not accept the claim that questions areformed by a movement rule” (Ambridge et al., 2008, pp. 245-248) and “childrenacquire questions as an independent construction.” According to the biolinguisticapproach, all linguistic behaviour, including the formation of Yes/No questions,adheres to structure-dependence. The biolinguistic approach contends that allderivations by children and adults, across languages, are structure-dependent – themind imposes structure onto experience, and not the other way around.Note, however, that a computationally simpler, structure-independent operationcould also derive (2) from (1). The structure-independent operation simply treatssentences like beads-on-a-string. The operation proceeds from left-to-right, one word ata time, until it encounters a member of a list of words {is, can, will, }. When it findsone of these words, the word is repositioned at the beginning of the sentence. Thestructure-
psycholinguistic unit of child language acquisition is the utterance, which has as its foundation the expression and understanding of communicative intentions” (Tomasello 2000, p. 61) What children acquire, then, is a mapping of forms with functions. The usage-based account purports that, in tandem, form and function also explain how children build up relations among constructions. As .
3. the inevitability of child directed speech 62 matthew saxton 4. universal grammar approaches to language acquisition 87 maria teresa guasti 5. second language acquisition 109 susan gass part 2. windows on language acquisition 6. language and the many faces of emotion 143 judy s. reilly 9780230_500303_01_prexx.indd v 4/15/2009 8:43:26 PM. vi language acquisition 7. complements enable .
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