I don’t remember learning to talk, nor do I have siblings or have been around younger children to see the process to take place. However, I do know that my parents tell me my first word was ‘no’, and that sums up the answer to whether we in the field of linguistics have ended the ancient debate as to whether language acquisition is something innate in children, or whether it is all taught.
Since the early 1960s, the ‘innatist’ approach to child language acquisition has predominated; it is the belief that children don’t learn language – especially grammar – like they learn how to tell time but “instead it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains” (Pinker, 2003, p. 18). Theorists linked to this approach believe that children are pre-wired and have a language instinct, therefore when exposed to language it triggers this part of the brain and they absorb what they hear, therefore learning the grammar of their language.
Noam Chomsky’s idea of Universal Grammar (UG) influenced Pinker’s language instinct hypothesis. Effectively, UG is the “properties of language that are mentally represented by an internal linguistic system” (White, 2003, p. 2) which claims that children are pre-wired to be able to master the grammar of their language. Evidence for this includes the phenomenon of overgeneralization whereby children produce logically correct but conventionally incorrect inflections on, for instance, irregular verbs – ‘I runned’, ‘Mummy buyed’, ‘sheeps’ etc. According to Chomsky, the language stimuli that children are exposed to would never include such inflections – called the ‘poverty of stimulus’ – and therefore they must already have internalized system of grammatical rules.
Is the concept of UG dying out, and if so why is it as Max Planck one noted, “older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways” or is it just because its simply nonsense” (Ibbotson & Tomasello, 2016)?
Critics of this approach have proposed an alternative explanation for children’s seemingly effortless abilities to acquire grammar, often labelled as ‘social constructivism’. According to Rowland (2014, p. 128) constructivists “claim that children do not come equipped with innate knowledge of grammar”. They believe that children have broader innate cognitive skills, of which language is just a part, due to their social and cultural environment (Evans, 2014, p. 96-97). Unlike Chomsky’s viewpoint, children socialise as a desire to communicate rather than just absorbing language blankly like a sponge. This function in use approach is the driving force for this constructivism approach and two skill sets form the fundamental components of such – ‘intention-reading’ and ‘pattern-finding’.
Both components are otherwise known as a bottom-up approach, in which grammatical “categories and rules are built up gradually” (Rowland, 2014, p. 96) and where language is “facilitated by parents, […] and others” (Kaufman, 2004, p. 304). This idea showcases how constructivists rely heavily on the notion of the caregiver and their input, therefore prioritizing the language input over the idea of innateness.
Ibbotson and Tomasello, two key constructivists, argue strongly for this position. With utterances such as “can you open the door for me?” or any others expressed by a caregiver, the child would need to follow the attention of the speaker, an example of an allegedly innate intention-reading skill. Whether the child can guess the intention behind what the caregiver is doing “will have a strong effect on whether [the child] interprets what [the caregiver] says accurately and, ultimately, whether the child learns the correct meaning of the sentence” (Rowland, 2014, p. 101). Next will come pattern-finding where a child needs to move “beyond individual utterances […] and create abstract linguistic schemas” (Tomasello, 2012, p. 70). This proposes that the child will begin to put, for example, wants and the desired object together as a pair in a sentence such as ‘I want X’ or ‘Mummy needs X’. Such basic schemas are argued to assist with sentence construction in the language acquisition process.
Many academics and theorists in the near future will continue to debate whether one approach is more valuable than the other, rather than simplistically right or wrong.
REBECCA SHERRY, English Language undergraduate, University of Chester, UK
References
Rowland, C. (2014) Understanding Child Language Acquisition. London, Routledge.
Language Debates 