Vorkosigan

In sum, the language organs appear to be structures that emerge with development, rather than pre-existing, structures.

An emergent viewpoint is that language emerges with the development of the brain.

KS, you keep repeating this, but it is not really an argument or a description of a process. Both sides agree that language emerges as the growing brain develops and is exposed to language in its environment. No strong innatist (SI hereafter), such as myself, would argue that the language organs are present in the fetus in some bizarre miniaturized form. Rather, we also see the structures as emerging as the brain develops. The difference is that we do not believe environmental stimuli+pre-adapted structures can wholly account for the acquisition of language.

What you have not articulated is what it means to say "emergent." What specific processes are involved? How does the "emergent" viewpoint answer the arguments of Chomsky and others about the poverty of stimulus? How do children learn that language comes in words, that there is such a thing as language, that objects in the world have intentions -- indeed, where do they get the whole idea of intentions? And many other such questions. These arguments cannot be dismissed by calling language "emergent."

Further, Rufus' objection about the "language window" was not properly answered. You simply noted that the pace of brain development in humans was different than that of apes, as if that were an explanation. Rufus and I quite agree that ape and human brains develop at different rates. This does not explain, however, why there is a "window" during which child language acquisition takes place at a much greater pace and with much greater ease than later in life. If language acquisition depends solely on brain development, then there should be no difference at all between first and second language acquisition, and there should be no identifiable "window" early in life that appears to "close" later on. Why does the "window" "close?"

If, however, by the innateness of language you mean specific language organs dedicated to acquiring language, then remarks about brain morphology cast quite a bit of doubt upon the innateness of language.

Why yes, a specific language processing structure is required. Several, in fact. But here you seem to be mistaking a specific one for one of fixed location. The device could be specific, yet located differently in different brains. Morphology is neutral with respect to innatist theories.

Even those children diagnosed with “specific language disorders? for example, end up having more going on, such as attention deficit issues, or auditory processing disorders such as deficits in fine discrimination in timing and separation, or short auditory memory spans. In other words, again, issues involving component skills that underlie language development.

There is nothing in here that militates against the SI view. Most SIers see brain processes as not having a centralized location, but taking place simultaneously in many parts of the brain, with the different subsystems drawing on different components as needed. Naturally a failure in the subsystems produces problems elsewhere, and vice versa. Lots of bootstrapping going on in the brain.

Difficulties in sequencing the fine motor movements necessary for the clear production of speech, for example, would also be likely to have an effect on other sequential skills, including syntax/grammar

Are grammar and syntax squential skills like fine motor movements? Grammar frequently involves holding large portions of the sentence in the processing memory while waiting for the key word to appear. Grammar skills also involve processing different parts of words differently. Do motor skills mimic this process?

Vorkosigan

RufusAtticus

And this disproves innatism how? Is bipedal walking not an innate ability because developing brains must learn to coordinate? Is sight not an innate ability because developing brains must learn to process signals from the eyes? Of course not. If language was simply a by product of our ability to problem solve, then there would not be a developmental window.

Whoever said that I was a “strong” innatist? You seem to believe that language cannot emerge in development if it was innate. Language innatism only argues that language is a specific cognitive ability and not a by-product of other cognitive abilities. You on the other hand have argued that language emergence requires language to be a by-product. That is the problem that I find in your argument.

Why is that? You don’t take any issue with hearing or sight being innate abilities, do you? Yet visual and auditory cortexes can and are co-opted in development.

Your viewpoint is a non sequitor. Just because humans an apes differ in one respect does not mean that other respects fall out of it. What brain differences would you expect from innate language ability? A new lobe? A unique area? You seem to not understand the similarities between ape and human communications. That has always been a major flaw in people who argue that language is a by-product. Language evolved from other forms of communication, like gestures. So it is not surprising that we find language areas of the brain tied to other things. In fact, Hauser et al. (2002) argues that the unique ability of human communication is recursion. Do you think that such an ability requires a novel neurological structure? Lingua non facta est in saltu.

So what? The world is not input free. The point here is that these children didn’t acquire anyone’s language; they formed their own. If language acquisition was only a by-product of our brains analyzing our environment then by all accounts these children should either lack language or lack a novel one.

How so? If language acquisition was only a by-product of our brains analyzing our environment, why are creoles complex compared to pidgins? Why did the second wave of kids build upon the early crude forms of communication? If language acquisition is just reasoning out the previous form of communication, why the natural bias of these kids to communicate with structure and grammar?

As someone who went the last international conference on the evolution of language, I can say this is false. You have designated a division that doesn’t exist. Like all parts of human biology, the devices for language acquisition came from preexisting features. Specific language learning devices evolved from pre-adaptations. I don’t see why you expect them to be separate.

So far the only argument I’ve seen out of you is that brain morphology can compensate for damages. So what? If this holds true for the innate abilities of seeing and hearing, why does this disprove innateness of language?

You’ve missed the point. Children are not taught the rules of language. They’re exposed to a language (meaning-signal pairs if you will). The fact that children naturally treat meaning-signals pairs as structured and not holistic, argues for cognitive biases. Without biases set up by the language acquisition devise, what is to prevent children from just memorizing meaning-signals pairs instead of parsing them? That is the major argument for specific cognitive features for language acquisition. That is what Chomsky's "Universial Grammar" is now considered to be: cognative biases for structured communication.

lpetrich

One must not suppose that instinct and learning are opposites; they can often be mixed very intimately, as some animal-behavior experiments show. For example, from this discussion of the evolution of animal behavior,

Happy Wonderer

What sort of languages would falsify the theory that there exists a universal grammar?

As far as I know the term 'universal grammar' is a bit of a misnomer -- there isn't a simple grammar that all languages fit into. Instead, there is a hypothesis that there is a grammar generator -- something that if you flip the right switches and conditionals will generate the grammar for any known language. No such formal grammar generator yet exists, but people are working on it. To a non-linquist, this doesn't seem all that deep; with enough conditional statements you can formally describe practically anything...


Very broadly, the purpose of language is to communicate unknown information. If a language didn't have some discoverable syntax (and other) rules, ambiguities could not be resolved. "Joe hit Mary" can only be resolved using rules of syntax. Can one propose a language that would unambiguously communicate subject/object relationships yet that couldn't be included in a universal grammar? (I as seriously, I'm not a linguist and only studied this stuff the bare minimum that I had to in order to get through A.I. courses...)

It isn't all that surprising to me that children came up with their own sign language. They had contact, a common need and common experiences. It would have been more surprising had the language ended up being the same as American Sign Language!

HW

RufusAtticus

Based on the current ideas of universal grammar, holistic languages would. Holistic is a term refering to communications that lack internal structure. I.E. /johnhitmary/ means "John hit Mary, but /johnhitmark/ means "Give the milk to me."

That statements rests on the assumption that "Joe," "hit," and "Mary" are all separate entities with there own meaning. But /joehitmary/ can be understood without grammar by simple signal-meaning memorization.

lpetrich

Also, it must be noted that human languages have a lot of variability.

Sound seldom corresponds to meaning, and sound-imitation words can vary.

Phonology (selection of speech sounds used and distinguished) is very variable; some languages have speech sounds that others lack, and some distinguish speech sounds that others treat as variants of a single sound ("allophones"). I recall from somewhere that babies learn to distinguish the speech sounds that they hear -- and that which ones they distinguish depends on which ones they hear.

And though the more basic sorts of grammatical categories are universal, such as distinguishing noun-like and verb-like elements, there are lots of variations in detail, such as preferred word order, how much morphology a word can have, what gender/classifier systems are used, and so forth.

Doubting Didymus

Please, If I may ask a question to clarify the respecive positions here?

In a hypothetical, if you somehow raised a group of children from birth with no contact with other language using humans, Would the group develop a language on their own?

What is the answer to this question, from an innatist and a developmentalist perspective?

RufusAtticus

The group of children would naturally develop their own language and it would be as structurally complex as already established languages.

pz

Is that the innatist or the developmentalist perspective? I'd call that a prediction of the developmentalist position as well as the innatist.

Vorkosigan

In a hypothetical, if you somehow raised a group of children from birth with no contact with other language using humans, Would the group develop a language on their own?

IMHO, no. The strong innatist view is interactionist. Language is not genetically programmed, but the result of an interaction between pre-existing cognitive processing biases and a linguistic stimulus in the environment. The environmental effect is as fully necessary as the genetic basis.

Vorkosigan