NATIVIST THEORIES (INNATE IDEAS) OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

NATIVIST THEORIES (INNATE IDEAS) OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The Nativist Approach

The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language. Innateness hypotheses gained support from several sides. Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed that language is a "species-specific" behavior and that certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined. Chomsky (1965) similarly claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child's mastery of a native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language. This innate knowledge, according to Chomsky, was embodied in a metaphorical "little black box" in the brain, a language acquisition device (LAD). McNeill (1966) described the LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties:

1. The ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment

2. The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined

3. Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not

4. The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input

McNeill and other researchers in the Chomskyan tradition composed eloquent arguments for the appropriateness of the LAD proposition, especially in contrast to behavioral, stimulus-response (S-R) theory, which was so limited in accounting for the creativity present in child language. The notion of linguistically oriented innate predispositions fits perfectly with generative theories of language: children were presumed to use innate abilities to generate a potentially infinite number of utterances. Aspects of meaning, abstractness, and creativity were accounted for more adequately. Even though it was readily recognized that the LAD was not literally a cluster of brain cells that could be isolated and neurologically located, such inquiry on the cognitive side of the linguistic-psychological continuum stimulated a great deal of fruitful research.

More recently, researchers in the nativist tradition have continued this line of inquiry through a genre of child language acquisition research that focuses on what has come to be known as Universal Grammar (White, 2003; see also Gass & Selinker, 2001, pp. 168-191; Mitchell & Myles, 1998, pp. 42-71; Cook, 1993, pp. 200-245, for overviews). Assuming that all human beings are genetically equipped with abilities that enable them to acquire language, researchers expanded the LAD notion by positing a system of universal linguistic rules that went well beyond what was originally proposed for the LAD. Universal Grammar (UG) research attempts to discover what it is that all children, regardless of their environmental stimuli (the language[s] they hear around them) bring to the language acquisition process. Such studies have looked at question formation, negation, word order, discontinuity of embedded clauses ("The ball that's on the table is blue"), subject deletion ("Es mi hermano"), and other grammatical phenomena.

One of the more practical contributions of nativist theories is evident if you look at the kinds of discoveries that have been made about how the system of child language works. Research has shown that the child's language, at any given point, is a legitimate system in its own right. The child's linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer "incorrect" structures-not a language in which earlier stages have more "mistakes" than later stages. Rather, the child's language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis of the input received and then testing those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension). As the child's language develops, those hypotheses are continually revised, reshaped, or sometimes abandoned.

Before generative linguistics came into vogue,]ean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children learn language not as a series of separate discrete items but as an integrated system. Using a simple nonsense-word test, Berko discovered that English-speaking children as young as four years of age applied rules for the formation of plural, present progressive, past tense, third singular, and possessives. She found, for example, that if children saw a drawing of an object labeled as a "wug" they could easily talk about two "wugs," or if they were presented with a person who knows how to "gling;' children could talk about a person who "g1inged" yesterday, or sometimes who "g1ang."

Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct hypothetical grammars (that is, descriptions of linguistic systems) of child language, although such grammars were still solidly based on empirical data. These grammars were largely formal representations of the deep structure-the abstract rules underlying surface output, the stmcture not overtly manifest in speech. Linguists began to examine child language from early one-, two-, and three, word forms of "telegraphese" (like "allgone milk" and "baby go boom" mentioned earlier) to the complex language of five- to ten-year-olds. Borrowing one tenet of structural and behavioral paradigms, they approached the data with few preconceived notions about what the child's language ought to be, and probed the data for internally consistent systems, in much the same way that a linguist describes a language in the "field."

A generative framework turned out to be ideal for describing such processes. The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot grammars. It was commonly observed that the child's first two-word utterances seemed to manifest two separate word classes, and not simply two words thrown together at random. Consider the following utterances: "my cap"; "that horsie"; "bye-bye Jeff"; "Mommy sock." Linguists noted that the words on the left-hand side seemed to belong to a class that words on the right-hand side generally did not belong to. That is, my could co-occur with cap, horsie, Jeff, or sock, but not with that or bye-bye. Mommy is, in this case, a word that belongs in both classes. The first class of words was called "pivot," since they could pivot around a number of words in the second, "open" class. Thus the first rule of the generative grammar of the child was described as follows:

Sentence                      pivot word + open word

Research data gathered in the generative framework yielded a multitude of such rules. Some of these rules appear to be grounded in the UG of the child. As the child's language matures and finally becomes adult like, the number and complexity of generative rules accounting for language competence, of course, boggles the mind.

Challenge to Nativist Approaches

In subsequent years the generative "rule-governed" model in the Chomskyan tradition was challenged. The assumption underlying this tradition is that those generative rules, or "items" in a linguistic sense, are connected serially, with one connection between each pair of neurons in the brain. A "messier but more fruitful picture" (Spolsky, 1989, p. 149) was provided by what has come to be known as the parallel distributed processing (PDP) model, based on the notion that information is processed simultaneously at several levels of attention. As you read the words on this page, your brain is attending to letters, word juncture and meaning, syntactic relationships, textual discourse, as well as background experiences (schemata) that you bring to the text. A child's (or adult's) linguistic performance may be the consequence of many levels of simultaneous neural interconnections rather than a serial process of one rule being applied, then another, then another, and so forth.

A simple analogy to music may further illustrate this complex notion. Think of an orchestra playing a symphony. The score for the symphony may have, let's say, 12 separate parts that are performed simultaneously. The "symphony" of the human brain enables us to process many segments and levels of language, cognition, affect, and perception all at once-in a parallel configuration. And so, according to the PDP model, a sentence-which has phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, discourse, Sociolinguistic, and strategic properties-is not "generated" by a series of rules (Ney & Pearson, 1990; Sokolik, 1990). Rather, sentences are the result of the simultaneous interconnection of a multitude of brain cells.

Closely related to the PDP concept is a branch of psycholinguistic inquiry called connectionism (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986), in which neurons in the brain are said to form multiple connections: each of the 100 billion nerve cells in the brain may be linked to as many as 10,000 of its counterparts. In this approach, experience leads to learning by strengthening particular connections-sometimes at the expense of weakening others. For example, the first language acquisition of

English regular past tense forms by children may proceed as a series of connections.

First, a child may confidently connect the form went with the verb go. Then, children will often perceive another connection, the regular -ed suffix attached to a verb, and start using the word goed. Finally, with more complex connections, children will perceive goed as incorrect, and maintain both connections, the oed form connected to most verbs, and the went form as a special connection. "According to such accounts, there are no 'rules' of grammar. Instead, the systematicities of syntax emerge from the set of learned associations between language functions and base and past tense forms , with novel responses generated by 'online' generalizations from stored examples" (N. Ellis, 2003, p. 88).

Finally, in recent years a further development of connectionist models of language acquisition is seen in a position that oddly hearkens back to the spirit of behavioral approaches. Emergentism, a perspective, espoused by O'Grady (1999, 2003), MacWhinney (1999), and others, holds that "the complexity of language emerges from, relatively simple developmental process being exposed to a massive and complex environment. The interactions that constitute language are associations, billions of connections, which co-exist within a neural system as organisms co-exist within an eco-system. And systematicities emerge as a result of their interactions and mutual constraints" (N. Ellis, 2003, p. 81). This perspective disagrees sharply with earlier nativist views by suggesting that "there is no inborn Universal Grammar (i.e., no innate grammatical system)" (O'Grady, 1999, p.623).

Emergentism perhaps represents a more cautious approach to a theory of language acquisition than was evident in the early nativist claims, some arguments (Schwartz, 1999) notwithstanding. By attending more judiciously to observable linguistic performance and to the identification of neurolinguistic components of language acquisition (Schumann et al., 2004), researchers can be more cautious about making too strongly "mentalistic" claims about the psychological reality of rule construction in language acquisition.

Approaches from within the nativist framework-as well as the challenges just outlined above-have made several important contributions to our understanding of the first language acquisition process:

1. Freedom from the restrictions of the so-called "Scientific method" to explore the unseen, unobservable, underlying, abstract linguistic structures being developed in the child

2. The construction of a number of potential properties of Universal Grammar, through which we can better understand not just language acquisition but the nature of human languages in general

3. Systematic description of the child's linguistic repertoire as either rule-governed or operating out of parallel distributed processing capacities, or the result of experiential establishment of connections

Nature & Systematicity

Nativists contend that a child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition toward language, and that this innate property (the LAD or UG) is universal in all human beings. The innateness hypothesis was a possible resolution of the contradiction between the behavioral notion that language is a set of habits that can be acquired by a process of conditioning and the fact that such conditioning is much too slow and inefficient a process to account for the acquisition of a phenomenon as complex as language.

An interesting line of research on innateness was pursued by Derek Bickerton (1981), who found evidence, across a number of languages, of common patterns of linguistic and cognitive development. He proposed that human beings are "bioprogrammed" to proceed from stage to stage. Like flowering plants, people are innately programmed to "release" certain properties of language at certain developmental ages. Just as we cannot make a geranium bloom before its "time," so human beings will "bloom" in predetermined, preprogrammed steps.

One of the assumptions of a good deal of current research on child language is the systematicity of the process of acquisition. From pivot grammar to three- and four-word utterances, and to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of language. Ever since Berko's (1958) grolll1dbreaking "wug" study, we have been discovering more and more about the systematicity of the acquisition process.

Universals Grammars (UG)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several researchers pointed out that the language of second language (L2) learners is systematic and that learner errors are not random mistakes but evidence of rule-governed behavior (Adjemian, 1976; Corder, 1967; Nemser, 1971; Selinker, 1972). From this developed the conception of “interlanguage,” the proposal that L2 learners have internalized a mental grammar, a natural language system that can be described in terms of linguistic rules and principles. The current generative linguistic focus on interlanguage representation can be seen as a direct descendent of the original interlanguage hypothesis. Explicit claims are made about the nature of interlanguage competence, the issues being the extent to which interlanguage grammars are like other grammars, as well as the role of Universal Grammar (UG).

The question of whether UG mediates L2 acquisition, and to what extent, has been much debated since the early 1980s. This question stems from a particular perspective on linguistic universals and from particular assumptions about the nature of linguistic competence. In the generative tradition, it is assumed that grammars are mental representations, and that universal principles constrain these representations. Linguistic universals are as they are because of properties of the human mind, and grammars (hence, languages) are as they are because of these universal principles. The first decade of research on the role of UG in L2 acquisition concentrated on so-called “access,” exploring whether UG remains available in non-primary acquisition. The issue of UG access relates to fundamental questions such as: what are natural languages grammars like? What is the nature of linguistic competence? How is it acquired? UG is proposed as a partial answer, at least in the case of the first language (L1) grammar, the assumption being that language acquisition is impossible in the absence of specific innate linguistic principles which place constraints on grammars, restricting the “hypothesis space,” or, in other words, severely limiting the range of possibilities that the language acquirer has to entertain. In L2 acquisition research, then, the issue is whether interlanguage representations are also constrained by UG.

UG is proposed as part of an innate biologically endowed language faculty (e.g., Chomsky, 1965, 1981; Pinker, 1994). It places limitations on grammars, constraining their form (the inventory of possible grammatical categories in the broadest sense, i.e., syntactic, semantic, phonological), as well as how they operate (the computational system, principles that the grammar is subject to). UG includes invariant principles, as well as parameters which allow for variation. While theories like Government-Binding (GB) (Chomsky, 1981), Minimalism (Chomsky, 1995), or Optimality Theory (Archangeli and Langendoen, 1997) differ as to how universal principles and parameters are formalized, within these approaches there is a consensus that certain properties of language are too abstract, subtle, and complex to be acquired in the absence of innate and specifically linguistic constraints on grammars.

UG is postulated as an explanation of how it is that learners come to know properties of grammar that go far beyond the input, how they know that certain things are not possible, why grammars are of one sort rather than another. The claim is that such properties do not have to be learned. Proposals for an innate UG are motivated by the observation that, at least in the case of L1 acquisition, there is a mismatch between the primary linguistic data (PLD), namely the utterances a child is exposed to, and the abstract, subtle, and complex knowledge that the child acquires. In other words, the input (the PLD) underdetermines the output (the grammar). This is known as the problem of the poverty of the stimulus or the logical problem of language acquisition.

Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to aU languages. Decades ago Werner Leopold (1949), who was far ahead of his time, made an eloquent case for certain phonological and grammatical universals in language. Leopold inspired later work by Greenberg (1963, 1966), Bickerton (1981), Slobin (1986, 1992, 1997), and \Vhite (1989, 2003), among others.

Currently, as noted earlier in this chapter, research on Universal Grammar continues this quest. One of the keys to such inquiry lies in research on child language acquisition across many different languages in order to determine the commonalities. Slobin (1986, 1992, 1997) and his colleagues gathered data on language acquisition in, among others, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hebrew, and Turkish. Interesting universals of pivot grammar and other telegraphese emerged. Maratsos (1988) enumerated some of the universal linguistic categories under investigation by a number of different researchers:

·         Word order

·         Morphological marking tone

·         Agreement (e.g., of subject and verb)

·         Reduced reference (e.g., pronouns, ellipsis) nouns and noun classes

·         Verbs and verb classes

·         Predication

·         Negation

·         Question formation

Much of current UG research is centered on what have come to be known as principles and parameters. Principles are invariable characteristics of human language that appear to apply to all languages universally, such as those listed above. Cook (1997, pp. 250-251) offered a simple analogy: Rules of the road in driving universally require the driver to keep to one side of the road; this is a principle. But in some countries you must keep to the left (e.g., the United Kingdom, Japan) and in others keep to the right (e.g., the United States, Taiwan); the latter is a parameter. So, parameters vary across languages. White (2003, p. 9) notes that "UG includes principles with a limited number of built-in options (settings or values), which allow for cross-linguistic variation. Such principles are known as parameters." If, for example, all languages adhere to the principle of assigning meaning to word order, then depending on the specific language in question, variations in word order (e.g. , subject-verb-object; subject-object-verb, etc.) will apply.

According to some researchers, the child's initial state is said to "consist of a set of universal principles which specify some limited possibilities of variation,  expressible in terms of parameters which need to be fixed in one of a few possible ways" (Saleemi, 1992,p. 58). In simpler terms, this means that the child's task of language learning is manageable because of certain naturally occurring constraints.

For example, the principle of structure dependency "states that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence (such as words, morphemes, etc.)" (Holzman, 1998, p. 49).

Take, for example, the following sentences:

1. The boy kicked the ball.

2. The boy that's wearing a red shirt and standing next to my brother kicked the ball.

3. She's a great teacher.

4. Is she a great teacher?

The first two sentences rely on a structural grouping, characteristic of all languages, called "phrase;' or more specifically, "noun phrase." Without awareness of such a principle, someone would get all tangled up in sentence (2). Likewise, the principle of word order permutation allows one to perceive the difference between (3) and (4). Children, of course, are not born with such sophisticated perceptions of language; in fact, sentences like (2) are incomprehensible to most native English-speaking children until about the age of 4 or 5. Nevertheless, the principle of structure dependency eventually appears in both the comprehension and production of the child.

According to UG, languages cannot vary in an infinite number of ways. Parameters determine ways in which languages can vary. Just one example should suffice to illustrate. One parameter, known as "head parameter," specifies the position of the "head" of a phrase in relation to its complements in the phrase. While these positions vary across languages, their importance is primary in all languages. Languages are either "head first" or "head last." English is a typical head-first language, with phrases like "the boy that's wearing a red shirt" and "kicked the ball." Japanese is a head-last language, with sentences like "wa kabe ni kakkatte

imasu" (picture wall on is hanging) (from Cook & Newson, 1996, p. 14).

Bibliography

Doughty, Catherine J and Long, Michael H. 2005. The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Blackwell Publishing

Searle, J.R. 1971. The philosophy of Language. London: Oxford University Press