Innate Ability for Language Acquisition

Tuesday, 13 October 2009 09:54 Graham Williamson ABSTRACT: An innate ability for language acquisition is the claim that humans are genetically pre-programmed to learn language. Observations such as the uniqueness of the human speech organs, the speed of acquisition of language, the presence of linguistic universals, and the claim that language is unique to humans are all used to support this view.

Innatist View
The theory which asserts that human beings are genetically pre-programmed to learn language has been popularized most effectively by the American linguist Noam Chomsky. The assertion is argued on several counts. We will discuss four of these.

The structure of human speech organs

Humans are most often compared with apes and, in fact, our vocal apparatus is extraordinarily similar to that found in all mammals. The uniqueness of the human vocal apparatus, however, has more to do with the location of the organs and, especially, the larynx. In humans the larynx is located lower down in the neck. The consequence of this is that it increases the area available for us to modify sounds. The ability to produce certain sounds is unique to humans. For example, only humans can produce the consonant sounds k as in kite and g as in gun, and the vowel sounds o as in hot, ee as in beet, and oo as in boo. Moreover, apes do not have the necessary fine control over the diaphragm and other muscles involved in breathing which allow humans to voluntarily use air from the lungs for speech. With respect to vocal tract anatomy, Tecumseh Fitch (2009) has video X-rayed several mammals as they are vocalizing and notes that the mammalian vocal tract is, in fact, extremely flexible. The anatomy dynamically rearranges itself while the animal is vocalizing, with the larynx being moved downwards. Fitch, therefore, claims that if it were just down to anatomy, all mammals would have the ability to talk: the constraint thats keeping a chimpanzee from speaking or indeed keeping a dog from speaking is not the peripheral vocal anatomy. Because any of these animals that weve looked at are able to lower the larynx and reconfigure the peripheral vocal tract into a human-like

configuration, basically anytime they vocalizeSo, it must be in the brain, by a process of elimination. So, to communicate orally we need both an appropriate vocal apparatus and a brain capable of processing large amounts of symbolic information. In humans we can identify a language centre in both hemispheres of the brain, within what is known as the planum temporale. In 94% of people the part of the brain known as Wernickes area (see Anatomy of the Brain), situated within the planum temporale, is larger in the left hemisphere than in the right. For these people, the left hemisphere is the dominant side for language. In addition to this language processing part of the brain we also know that humans are adept at processing auditory signals. At about one month of age a human infant is capable of distinguishing between certain speech sounds, such as p as in the word pin and b as in the word bin, and t as in the word tin and d as in the word din. In addition, at just six months of age the infant is capable of detecting sounds as quiet as 1 decibel (dB) (for comparison, a whisper is around 10 dB). This suggests that humans auditory perception is genetically preprogrammed and indicates an innate preparedness to learn language. Until recently it was thought that no language centre was located in the brains of the great apes. However, in 1998 a research team led by Patrick Gannon made measurements of the size of the planum temporale in 18 chimpanzee brains. Their findings showed that in 17 out of the 18 chimp brains the area was larger in the left hemisphere than in the right, i.e. 94% just as in humans. This finding is, obviously, not conclusive but it does suggest the possibility that humans and chimps may share a common neurological substrate for language.

The speed of acquisition of language

Innatists argue that the staggering rate at which children acquire language skills can only be explained if one supposes that children are genetically pre-programmed to learn language. They claim that the child does not come to the language learning task with a blank mind but has an innate disposition to learn language. This claim is put into perspective when we note that the average five-year-old has an expressive vocabulary of around 2000 words and that by the age of seven years this will have doubled. In addition, the size of the comprehension vocabulary (i.e. the words understood by the child but not necessarily used expressively) will be much higher than this. Further, a five-year-old will understand most grammatical structures and express their self clearly in most situations, using so-called wh-questions such as how, when and why. Their speech will be intelligible to familiar and unfamiliar listeners, as they will use all but the most difficult speech sounds. Moreover, the child will be able to use language for a variety of reasons: to express feelings, to make requests, to disagree, and so on. This is a remarkable feat to which chimps can never aspire.

Language is unique to humans

Whilst the human compulsion to communicate is realized by their use of language, some have challenged the claim that language can only be used by humans. Attempts have been made to teach language skills to a variety of animals but the most success has been achieved through working with chimpanzees. The two most famous chimps are Washoe and Sarah who began their training in the 1960s. Now, because chimpanzees do not have the requisite vocal apparatus to be able to speak, Washoe was taught a version of American Sign Language and Sarah was taught to manipulate plastic tokens on a magnetic board.

Whilst the two apes were able to learn some aspects of language, the process was extremely slow and laborious and Washoe had a vocabulary of only 85 signs and 294 two-sign combinations after about five years training. It is quite an understatement to say that this does not compare favorably with the extensive language development achieved by the average five-year-old human. However, both Washoe and Sarah did demonstrate some key properties of language:

A remarkable development occurred when Washoe adopted an infant chimp named Loulis. No sign language was used by humans in Loulis presence for five years and yet Loulis was able to learn over 50 signs through her association with Washoe. This demonstrates the property of cultural transmission, i.e. the chimps continued to use sign language and pass this on to other chimps without any input from humans. Sarah was presented with the construction Brown (is the) color of chocolate when there was no chocolate in sight. Later, she was shown several colored objects and presented with the phrase, Take brown and she successfully selected a brown object. Sarah was, therefore, able to use language to think of something that was not immediately present and to apply that learning at a later time. This is an example of the key language property known as displacement.

Several other apes have been taught language skills and various claims that they have been able to demonstrate other key properties of language have been made.

Linguistic universals
Innatists noted that whilst different languages (e.g. English, Welsh, Chinese) have different rules or grammars, they also have many things in common. These language similarities are known as linguistic universals. There are many cited examples of linguistic universals but we will illustrate them here with just one example the use of negatives.

It is claimed that children follow a remarkably similar pattern when developing the use of socalled negation. Typically developing children appear to follow a predetermined pattern of language learning. For example, at around 18 months of age children learning English form utterances made up of two-word combinations such as the following. daddy gone Sarah play doggy bark At first, when they attempt to make the utterances negative, children simply put no or not in front of the two-word combination: no daddy gone not Sarah play no doggy bark At a later stage the child appears to realize that the negative should be contained within the utterance and the no or not is then inserted between the words: daddy no gone Sarah not play doggy no bark Eventually the adult form is used: daddy didnt go Sarah isnt playing the doggy is not barking The important point to note here is that, with the obvious exception of the final adult forms, the child could not possibly have been imitating adult utterances. This is because the childs utterances do not represent grammatical English constructions. In sum, adults do not talk like this! This is often referred to as the poverty of stimulus argument, i.e. such-and-such a grammatical feature must be universal because it would be impossible for children to learn it on the basis of the evidence they are provided with. Linguistic universals, then, are seen as generalizations abstracted from some universal grammar that is shared by all languages, and which is thought to be innate to humans. A linguistic universal is, therefore, a statement that is true for all natural languages. However, the claim that such absolute universals exist is controversial. It appears that absolute universals, i.e. statements that are unequivocally true for all natural languages (e.g. all spoken languages possess consonants and vowels; all natural languages use pronouns; all spoken language have at least three vowels) are actually quite rare. Typically, for the majority of socalled linguistic universals, counter-examples that refute the claim can be found. It seems, therefore, that most so-called linguistic universals are actually tendencies, i.e. they are statements

about linguistic features that may not hold true for all languages but the features are, nonetheless, too widespread to be the result of chance.

Language acquisition device (LAD)

Chomsky referred to the childs innate general language learning ability as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). He claims that children have a blueprint in the brain that allows them to recognize the structure-dependence of language and to manipulate these structures. Consider the following utterance. Graham kissed Margaret The units of this utterance can be manipulated to produce the following: Margaret was kissed by Graham When we consider these two utterances it is apparent that they both have the same essential meaning. However, their form, or structure, is different. We would say, therefore, that they both have the same deep structure but that they have a different surface structure. The original utterance Graham kissed Margaret could be further manipulated to form the following utterances: Who Graham kissed was Margaret The person kissed by Graham was Margaret It was Margaret who Graham kissed Again, we must conclude that each of these utterances has the same essential meaning, or deep structure (i.e. Graham kissed Margaret), but that their surface structures are quite different. Now consider the following utterance. the chicken was ready to eat What is the deep structure of this utterance? This is much harder to determine because the utterance is ambiguous. The possible deep structures may be represented diagrammatically as follows. the chicken was ready for the chicken was ready for the chicken to eat someone to eat the chicken

On the basis of the utterance alone, we are uncertain as to whether or not the chicken is ready to eat for itself or if the chicken is ready to be eaten by someone else. In this instance, therefore, we see that two different deep structures give rise to just the one surface structure. Now consider the following utterances. the chicken was anxious to eat

the chicken was delicious to eat The syntax of these two utterances is alike. Structurally, therefore, they are akin and they are again said to have a similar surface structure. However, their meanings are quite different. In the case of the first utterance it is the chicken that is doing the eating. In the second utterance it is the chicken that is being eaten! Consequently, whilst these two utterances demonstrate a similar, but not exactly the same, surface structure they have different deep structures. Chomsky argued that children know about deep structures and that they are able to apply rules that allow them to manipulate these structures, giving rise to a variety of surface structures. He calls these grammatical rules transformations. Chomskys ideas are persuasive and his theories have gained ground over the years. In sum, his proposals seem to imply that if a child has a properly functioning LAD then language will develop, regardless of the kinds of language experience the child is exposed to, as long as they are raised in an otherwise nurturing environment. Alternatively, if the LAD is damaged in some way it would seem that no amount of environmental support or teaching would make a difference. However, two main criticisms may be made: 1. The innatist view tends to focus on the internal, mental structures and thinking processes of the child. It is unlikely, therefore, that what research evidence we might be able to gather would enable us to fully understand exactly what is going on inside a childs mind. Researchers have, however, developed techniques for making informed inferences from what they observe. 2. The role of other people in assisting the child to learn language tends to be overlooked. As noted adult speech is fraught with hesitations, repetitions, slips of the tongue, and so on, and it therefore provides an imperfect model. However, research has shown that adults do in fact make considerable modifications to their speech when talking to children. These modifications are designed to assist the child with language learning and this type of modified talk is known as child-direct http://www.answers.com/topic/language System of conventional spoken or written symbols used by people in a shared culture to communicate with each other. A language both reflects and affects a culture's way of thinking, and changes in a culture influence the development of its language. Related languages become more differentiated when their speakers are isolated from each other. When speech communities come into contact (e.g., through trade or conquest), their languages influence each other. Most existing languages are grouped with other languages descended "genetically" from a common ancestral language (see historical linguistics). The broadest grouping of languages is the language family. For example, all the Romance languages are derived from Latin, which in turn belongs to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the ancient parent language, Proto-Indo-European. Other major families include, in Asia, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian,

Dravidian, Altaic, and Austroasiatic; in Africa, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, and NiloSaharan; and in the Americas, Uto-Aztecan, Maya, Otomanguean, and Tupian. Relationships between languages are traced by comparing grammar and syntax and especially by looking for cognates (related words) in different languages. Language has a complex structure that can be analyzed and systematically presented (see linguistics). All languages begin as speech, and many go on to develop writing systems. All can employ different sentence structures to convey mood. They use their resources differently for this but seem to be equally flexible structurally. The principal resources are word order, word form, syntactic structure, and, in speech, intonation. Different languages keep indicators of number, person, gender, tense, mood, and other categories separate from the root word or attach them to it. The innate human capacity to learn language fades with age, and languages learned after about age 10 are usually not spoken as well as those learned earlier. See also dialect. Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/language#ixzz1XtizOoXQ Evolution of language There is now more scholarly interest in the origin of language than at any time since the eighteenth century, although among linguists, anatomists, and anthropologists no consensus has emerged as to its timing and nature. When over the course of the nineteenth century no evidence of any primitive languages was found, discussion of origins was for a long time officially proscribed. One current view has it that an explosion of cave art and symbolic behaviour some 40000 years ago coincided with the abrupt extinction of Neanderthals, and was causally related to the emergence of language. But this is probably based on an illusion of synchronicity. The adaptation of the vocal tract for speech production in particular the lowering of the larynx seems to have been complete at least 125000, and perhaps 200000 years ago. This would seem to support a much earlier origin for language; some form of proto-language may well have been present in the earliest hominids. The question which exercised Charles Darwin as to whether there is evolutionary continuity between animal signalling systems and human language, has prompted, over the last thirty years, a number of widely publicized experiments involving attempts to teach human language to apes. Some of the early efforts foundered on the fact that other primates do not have the anatomy necessary for human speech production; later attempts using sign language seemed to fare better. The enduring ambiguity of the results lies not only in the slippage around definitions of language, but also in the tendency of primatologists, as linguistic creatures, to impute sense to their subjects, and to project the human world onto the realm of nature. The assumption of cross-species continuities and homologies with respect to language, implicit in the methods of ethologists and behaviourists working on very old associationist principles, was flatly rejected in a notorious 1959 polemic by the linguist Noam Chomsky, who argued that human language was based on entirely different principles from animal communication. Some detected, in this unqualified assertion of the absolute uniqueness of the human language faculty, an echo of the Victorian geologist Charles Lyell's remark, when he told Darwin that, despite being a supporter, he was unable to go the whole orang.

The power of the language faculty, however it came to be part of the species endowment, is acknowledged across all human cultures. The first words of a child are universally recognized as a momentous threshold; for an adult to have speaking privileges, or to decide who may talk or not, is a sure sign of social power. Those without language, infants (from the Latin infans: non-speaking) and domestic animals, as well as those denied language the shunned, the gagged, the silenced are in real ways disabled members of a community. Speech impairment typically results in discrimination; despite the partial success of the disability rights movement and the recognition that signing is no less a linguistic system than spoken language, dumb is still widely unchallenged as a term of abuse. It has often been claimed that in gesture lies the origin of language, but, if so, speech very early achieved primacy, perhaps because a vocal-auditory system had crucial advantages: no mutual visibility was necessary between speaker and audience, the mouth was otherwise unoccupied except when eating, and the hands were freed for other employment. The language faculty co-opted brain and body structures (mouth, ear) that had been developed for other functions (breathing, eating, balance). Spoken language makes use of sound carried on out-breathed air from the lungs, which is modulated by articulators (tongue, lips, etc.) to produce the vocal repertoire of a natural language. No single language uses anything like the full range of sounds of which humans are capable, and certain classes of sound for example, clicks and implosives, where the airstream is reversed and moves inwards are rare in the world's languages. Grammar and the body The discovery and analysis of the fundamental unit of spoken language, the phoneme (which had been intuited in antiquity by the Levantine inventors of the alphabet, and which corresponds roughly with the letter) was facilitated by formalist experiments in the disintegration of sound and meaning in certain centers of European modernism following World War I, in particular Moscow, Prague, Paris, and Geneva. Notwithstanding the interest of avant-garde poets in the sounding body, the legacy of Cartesian rationalism and the privileging of mind cast a long shadow far into the twentieth century. Indeed, the dominant traditions of inquiry into language continue to discount the body by way of an implied hierarchy in which speech is only the (more or less) imperfect performance of an abstract system, whose formal and logical structure it is the task of linguistic science to reveal. Such abstraction, idealizing away to a genderless speaker-hearer and relegating gesture, posture, and expression to the limbo of paralanguage, has led to far-reaching insights into grammatical theory. But the body lay hidden in the closet. That is to say, after all the abstraction, there remains a residue or rather a core of human language that cannot be reduced to context-free formulation. The phenomenon that linguists call deixis (pointing in classical Greek) sets limits to the decontextualization of language; even so austere a logician as Bertrand Russell acknowledged that the body could not be eliminated in the analysis of language, and that deictic categories such as personal pronouns (I, you), demonstrative (this, that), and adverbs (here, now) depend for their interpretation upon the relative, and reflexive, positioning of bodies in space and time. The body and meaning Anthropocentrism is deeply embedded in the fabric of language, which reflects the shape and properties of the body, which in turn grounds the linguistic encoding of social

3. 4.

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relations from empathy and solidarity to politeness and deference. The physical experience of gravity and the asymmetries of the human anatomy establish the meaning, for example, of up and down, front and back, right and left. (More than one science fiction plot has turned on the problem of conveying the concepts of right and left to an alien being whose body does not share with humans the necessary asymmetry.) Nor is it arbitrary that up and front tend to be positively valued relative to down and back, since upright, confronting encounters are taken as the norm for humans in speech situations. Modernity's array of communications media radio, film, television, video, the internet are greatly extending what the invention of writing first set in train, namely, the uncoupling of language in complex ways from its primordial face-to-face matrix. It is hardly clear what will be the outcome of the new relations of virtuality, but human meanings will necessarily continue to rest on embodied understandings, however much they are mediated. Indeed, such is the power of gesture that a wink or a sarcastic intonation inevitably reframes and inverts the literal meaning. The classic studies by the sociologist Erving Goffman of the management of daily encounters show how centrally the body is involved in the making of meaning; they reveal the significance and complexity of sight and touch in the business of opening, organizing, and closing conversations synchronizing turns at speaking by gesture and gaze, assessing one's reception through visual back-channel cues, and helping to perform talk. More recently, the linguist George Lakoff, collaborating at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, computer science, and neurology, likewise contends, from a quite different perspective, that meaning is grounded in the body. He makes a radical break with the rationalist tradition of his teacher, Noam Chomsky, by asserting the centrality of metaphor and by claiming that it is only through the body that concepts can be formed, since the human conceptual system grows out of the sensorimotor system. 7. Discourse and the body 8. Conversely, understandings of the body and its conduct are largely mediated through language and metaphor. Metaphors, moreover, are never innocent; they have cognitive, affective, and political import. The human body is truly the trope of tropes; body parts (head, foot, face) are everywhere mapped onto nature's body head of the river, foot of the mountain, face of the deep. Bodily functions are a universal reservoir for terms of profanity and scatological abuse. When the body is in distress, the power of language to organize its experience is attested in those healing traditions where speech is focal; a disease named is a disease half cured. In all cultures linguistic taboos circumscribe the body; where the naming of certain body parts in front of doctors may involve a loss of face, figurines have been used, allowing the patient to point to the affected part without showing or naming it. The deportment of bodies in social space, and the gearing of language into the infinite variety of improvised and ritual encounters, show that humans converse as communities of co-movers. But no community is homogeneous, and speaking takes place in a discursive forcefield constituted through a pragmatic negotiation that registers asymmetries of power in the bodily movements and speech of those co-present. Voice quality, for example, is an unavoidable accompaniment to the act of speaking, and

conveys culturally coded, and often finely textured, meanings about the speaker's identity in multiple intersecting dimensions age, class, sex, gender, region, subculture, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth. The existence of etiquette and elocution manuals, and the importance of diplomatic protocols, suggest that such signs are partly, but only partly, under the control of the speaker. Reading (and writing upon) the body has taken on fresh meaning in the late twentieth century, with the penetration of advertisements onto personal clothing, and the related vogue for inscriptions on the body surface itself. 9. The language animal 10. The practice of inscribing the body is at least 40000 years old no surprise, perhaps, for the primate that speaks. Language seems to have been the evolutionary Rubicon for Homo sapiens, though the Berkeley paleolinguist Johanna Nichols rejects the notion of linguistic monogenesis implicit in the image of a single crossing over into language. She believes it happened many times, and that hundreds of distinct languages were already being spoken in the Rift Valley of East Africa as many as are spoken today in Papua New Guinea before humans had fanned out on the way to planetary hegemony, armed with the mythomanic power of speech. The scandal of representation once prompted the critic Kenneth Burke to summarize the species in his own wry definition: the symbolusing animal, inventor of the negative, separated by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection. 11. Iain Boal 12. Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/language#ixzz1XtjacS7x