“[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 