“[Language] is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains” (Pinker, 2003).
Have you ever heard a baby making sounds and wondered how they develop from babbling to forming full sentences or even full conversations? Maybe you have younger siblings that have all started to speak at different ages and wondered why that is?
These two questions constitute what is often characterised as the ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ debate, in relation to child language acquisition (CLA), or more specifically nativism (nature) and constructivism (nurture).
Nativism is based around the hypothesis that children have the ability to acquire grammar from any language starting at birth, thanks to what Chomsky labelled a language acquisition device (LAD). From way back in the late 1950s, Chomsky argued that “children actively construct the rule systems of their native language aided by a brain already pre-wired with a special language capacity that is separate from other types of mental abilities” (Peccei, 2006, p. 3). Chomsky described this as a Universal Grammar (UG).
Children’s ability to seemingly effortlessly produce the correct inflections in any language, according to Chomsky, necessitates the existence of Universal Grammar, underlying syntactic principles which are genetically embedded in the human brain from birth. Since nativists believe that this knowledge is innate, they believe that it children don’t have to struggle to learn and apply e.g. inflection markers (marks tense and number) to words. For example, my twin brothers have said in the past that that they just fallen over and “hitted their face”, thereby over-generalising the ‘-ed” past tense inflection. This implies that past tense is a rule that is already wired into a child’s knowledge of language, which has not been imitated from their caregivers.
The famous ‘wug test’ experiment conducted by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958 is often cited as supporting this idea. Berko (1958) wanted to know whether children could apply morphological rules to words. The morphological rule she focused on was that the majority of English plurals are created by adding an /s/ or /z/, for example, dog – dogs. Young children were shown a picture of an imaginary animal and told ‘this is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two____.’ The children were able to list two imaginary animals as ‘wugs’, without ever having heard this formulation before. Being able to apply the morphological rule that plurals are created by adding a /s/ inflection, could imply some kind of innate predisposition to knowing the grammar of a language.
The predominant alternative view of nativism is commonly known as ‘constructivism’. Constructivists argue that “children do not come equipped with innate knowledge of grammar – neither principles nor parameters” (Rowland, 2014, p. 128). Instead, proponents such as Tomasello, believe that children acquire grammar by slowly assimilating language input. There are a few ways for children to learn words and sounds this way. A crucial element of this learning is what Tomasello and other believes is humans’ innate capacity for ‘intention-reading’ i.e. being able to focus attention with an adult, on an object in the immediate environment, about which they both communicate.
To test this, Baldwin (1993b) conducted a study to see whether children use social skills to learn words. Each child was given a toy to play with whilst the experimenter was holding a different toy. Half of the children took part in the joint attention condition. This is where the experimenter waited until both herself and the child was focusing on the toy, and then labelled the child’s toy with a novel word, for example, ‘it’s a toma’. The other children were tested in the discrepant labelling condition whereby the experimenter would wait until the child was looking at their own toy and then labelled her (experimenter’s) own toy with the novel word. After these two conditions, the experimenter showed all of the children the toys and asked them ‘where’s the toma?’. Eighteen and nineteen-month-old children were successful in identifying the correct toys as the ‘toma’ in both conditions. This is used to support the constructivist view as the children were aware that the speakers focus of attention was the important factor when trying to learn the meaning of a new word.
The evidence for both nativism and constructivism is compelling and it may be the case that children acquire language through a mixture of both innate knowledge (nativism) and their surroundings (constructivism).
VICTORIA COX, English Language undergraduate, University of Chester, UK
References
Baldwin, D. A. (1993b). Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. Journal of Child Language, 20 (2), pp. 395-418.
Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14: 150-77.
Peccei, S. J. (2006) Child Language: A resource book for students. Oxon, United Kingdom
Pinker, S. (2003). The language instinct. London: Penguin.
Rowland, C. (2014). Understanding Child Language Acquisition. Oxford: United Kingdom.
Language Debates 
Hi Victoria,
Congratulations on producing such an informative and thought-provoking blog post. I found it both insightful and interesting to read.
I agree with your opinion that it is probably the case that children acquire language through a mixture of both innate knowledge and also from interactions within their environment. However, as Rowland suggests, in regard to the nature vs. nurture debate surrounding language acquisition, “we are not even close to an answer” (2014, p.1). Rowland stated this in 2014, and now nearing 2020 we appear to be no closer to definite answer of how children develop language. This makes me wonder whether we will ever be able to categorically declare whether children are born with an innate ability to develop language, or if it is just another learnt ability, much like learning to ride a bike?
Chomsky’s work is said to have “revolutionized linguistics” (Behme & Deacon, 2008, p. 642). The idea that Chomsky is most widely known for is the “postulation of a domain specific language acquisition device (LAD)” (Behme & Deacon, 2008, p. 642). Your explanation of Chomsky’s belief that children must be born with a LAD as they appear to be able to effortlessly produce the correct inflections in language is one that I believe does have a substantial amount of evidence to support it.
The fact that children are able to produce grammatically complex sentences at a young age suggests that there might be an innate capacity present in humans to develop language. Chomsky’s Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) argument claims that the language children hear from their caregivers does not support the errors in language that children make. If language is just another learnt ability, developed through imitation then why do children use utterances that they most likely have never heard used by their caregiver? I enjoyed the example you used of your twin brothers saying they’d “hitted their face”, this over generalisation of the -ed past tense inflection is presumably not one they have heard from their caregivers!
On the other hand, I believe the Constructivist approach also has some interesting and viable ideas. From a constructivist approach, instead of supporting the idea of an innate capacity for language in order to explain why children (such as your brothers) over generalise the past tense -ed inflection, they propose that children are in fact unaware of inflected words (Rowland, 2014, p. 128). It is suggested that the child stores the unanalysed form, and then due to the fact “most inflected words tend to occur over and over again in the same sentence position and in the same contexts, children can generalise across these words to extract the common factor: the inflectional ending (-ed)” (Rowland, 2014, p. 128). This suggests that perhaps children extract patterns from verbs they already know and apply the same past tense ending as they know the inflection is correct in some instances.
Baldwin’s 1993 study testing children’s capacity for “intention-reading” which you have included as evidence for the constructivism approach focuses on the concept of joint attention. Scofield & Behrend summarise that during joint attention “the child (1) attends to the shared target with the speaker, (2) understands the speaker’s reference is intentional, and (3) concludes that the speaker’s intention is to refer to the shared target” (2011, p. 327). Moore et al go on to suggest that “under these conditions the task of word learning appears to be at its most transparent and thus most likely to be successful” (1999, p. 62). Therefore, it may be that in order to learn words and their meaning, joint attention could be considered to be a beneficial teaching method.
Finally, do you believe one approach is more credible than the other or do you believe both are valid?
References:
• Baldwin, D. A. (1993). Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. Journal of Child Language, 20(2), pp. 395-418.
• Behme, C. & Deacon, S. (2008). Language learning in Infancy: Does the empirical evidence support a domain specific language acquisition device? Philosophical Psychology, 21(5), pp. 641-671.
• Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P. (1999). Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), pp. 60-65.
• Rowland, C. (2014). Understanding child language acquisition. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.
• Scofield, J., & Behrend, D. A. (2011). Clarifying the role of joint attention in early word learning. First Language, 31(3), pp. 326-341.
A very interesting read Victoria, I completely agree with your conclusion; I feel there is evidence of both nativism and constructivism upon a child’s language acquisition.
For example, my friend has a two-year-old (I’ll call her child A) who does not attend nursery or play groups and her mother is her main care giver. My niece, on the other hand, (child B) is also two years old who attends nursery full-time and has several care givers. The difference in their range of vocabulary is quite astounding. Child B is learning at least 5-10 new words every day and is already putting sentences together (okay, the syntax might be a little off, but it still makes sense), whereas child A hardly speaks – she understands words but couldn’t match it to an object. If I asked “Get me a ball, please” to child B, not only would she recognise that word but she would identify the object without me having to point it out. However, (and Tomasello may have a point here) child A might be able to say the word but would not be able to identify the object, she would just keep bringing me objects and saying the word “ball”. Therefore, does child A not have the innate capacity for ‘intention reading’? Both children clearly have an innate predisposition, but child B’s has been nurtured through the several care givers and her nursery education. If every care giver could afford nursery fees, maybe all children would flourish in language!
I would argue the environment is a key part of any language construction, yes you could have an innate predisposition, but it would be impossible to not learn from your surroundings as well.
References
Tomasello, M., & Farrar, J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development, 57(2), 1454–1463.
Blog comment 2
Hi Victoria,
I enjoyed reading your blog on the Language acquisition debate as you carefully point out the different sides to the debate with sufficient evidence to back up your points.
By using the rhetorical questions in the beginning of your blog, it will certainly generate the reader to think back to when they were an infant or to when any siblings were infants. I think it is really useful to include a personal anecdote to support your hypotheses towards this approach as they can provide some empirical and verifiable evidence. However, I know that I simply cannot remember that far back which makes it problematic to know whether my own personal environment had an impact on language development or whether it was merely due to innateness. I have been told that between myself and my younger brother, it was my brother who began to construct sentences at an earlier age than I did. From this, do you think gender plays a role in this on-going debate? Or, is it merely down to environmental factors that Tomasello supports or pre-wired constructs that Chomsky supports?
I think that your main point towards the nativism approach about the ‘wug test’ (Berko, 1958) is widely accepted as evidence towards this side of the approach due to the fact that the children would add the plural /s/ onto a word, albeit a made-up word without being taught this rule. Clearly, children must have some sort of prewired predisposition for certain grammatical rules otherwise how could they possibly do this without any input from caregivers?
Despite this I do not believe that language development is merely down to one approach as there is a vast amount of evidence to support both sides that it is virtually impossible to generate an appropriate conclusion. So, I have to agree with your conclusion that children must acquire language through a combination of both arguments.
References:
Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14: 150-77.
Hi Victoria, I found your blog very enlightening regarding the topics of language acquisition and the nature/nurture debate. I particularly liked your early use of a Chomsky quote to help contextualise what is viewed as the Universal Grammar, and how children’s ability to implement the correct inflection markers into their speech and convey syntactic information factors into the Nativist belief that such knowledge is innate. The distinction between a special learning capacity and other mental functions seen in this quote was also useful in establishing the nativist viewpoint that language comes as naturally as any other mental faculty at a child’s disposal. I thought this lead nicely into the reference to your brothers as an example of overgeneralisation.
If you wanted to consider this in another context, you could relate such an example to the slot and frame patterns posed by Rowland (2014, p.128), wherein “The child […] generalises across slot and frame patterns […] to form new patterns, eventually discovering that the inflectional ending can be applied productively to a whole number of verbs”. Here, you could comment on the fact that in overgeneralising your brothers may have heard the inflectional ending ‘-ed’ in similar positions and extracted this pattern in an attempt to fit the slot ‘hit’. This would support the constructivist counterargument that such examples stem more from the categorisation of words and extraction of patterns (Rowland, 2014, p.96) through a bottom-up process (Evans, 2014, p.111). If it’s assumed that such pattern-finding abilities are innate however, maybe this could serve as an example of the two outlooks converging in some respects.
In relating the results of Baldwin’s ‘Toma’ study to the theory of intention reading, you raise an interesting topic of discussion about whether language learning comes as a result of joint attention between adult and infant when learning new words. Your reference to the result that eighteen and nineteen month old children in both conditions were successful in identifying the correct toys as ‘Tomas’ also coincides with Tomasello’s (2000, p.64) belief that children beyond the ages of nine to twelve months exhibit a “wide array of joint attentional skills involving outside objects”, which include “imitating the actions of others on objects” and “gaze direction and pointing gestures of others”.
Building off your conclusion, I’m curious about what your thoughts are on the possibility of children acquiring language through a mixture of both nativist and constructivist theories, and which of the ideas posed by these outlooks factor most predominantly into the acquisition of language by children.
References
Evans, V. (2014). The language myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rowland, C. (2014) Understanding child language acquisition. London & New York: Routledge.
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74.
Hi Victoria, I very much enjoyed reading your blog and learning about the different theories associated with language acquisition. You gave a balanced overview of each side of the debate.
I agree with your conclusion that language acquisition is a combination of innate knowledge and our surroundings. I think that as it is something that has been debated for many years and is something that is still being debated shows the complexity of language acquisition and that evidence for both sides of the argument is strong.
I enjoyed reading about Baldwin’s experiment and found it interesting as it is not something I would have ever really considered myself. This led me to read further into the theory of joint attention where I discovered a study conducted by Carpenter, Nagell and Tomasello in 1998 which “found a correlation between the amount of time spent by mothers engaging in joint attention with their children […] and the level of children’s word comprehension up to a year later” (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011, p. 71). This study had many limitations and a lot of the variables were not taken into account and therefore, I find it somewhat difficult to support. However, I do believe that the influence from those around us at a young age have a major influence on the acquisition of language. Ultimately, I think that social interaction at a young age, with other children and adults alike is important in order to develop language skills.
Furthermore, in relation to Baldwin’s experiment there were also concerns raised about the reliability of the testing. Ambridge and Lieven (2011, p. 72) states that the children may have been successful in “pairing the novel label with the item that was most ‘active’ in their own attentional focus without understanding joint attention.”
In light of this, do you believe that study by Baldwin and further similar studies are truly effective in supporting the Constructivist approach?
Reference:
Ambridge, B. & Lieven, E. (2011). Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2z-XYwS_evYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Child+Language+Acquisition&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiigcOry7rnAhXSYMAKHeN8AUoQ6AEITjAE#v=onepage&q=Child%20Language%20Acquisition&f=false