How children pick up a language: not instinct (Humans)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 11, 2016, 19:13 (3085 days ago) @ David Turell

The author presents a long article saying Chomsky is wrong, but the a makes one fatal mistake. He believes in Neo-Darwinism gradualism, not saltation, and that colors his argument. The rest of his discussion is reasonable:-https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dadb6e2213-Saturday_newsletter_11_June_20166_10_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-dadb6e2213-68942561-"Chomsky's idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.-***-"What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself - the language software - is something that each human child is born with. Chomsky's idea is this: just as we grow distinctive human organs - hearts, brains, kidneys and livers - so we grow language in the mind, which Chomsky likens to a ‘language organ'. -***-"If our knowledge of the rudiments of all the world's 7,000 or so languages is innate, then at some level they must all be the same. There should be a set of absolute grammatical ‘universals' common to every one of them. This is not what we have discovered. Here's a flavour of the diversity we have found instead.-***-"And of course, language doesn't need to be spoken: the world's 130 or so recognised sign languages function perfectly adequately without sound. It's a remarkable fact that linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression. How strange, if there is a common element to all human language, that it should be hidden beneath such a bewildering profusion of differences.-***-"Recursion allows us to rearrange words and grammatical units to form sentences of potentially infinite complexity. This ‘unique' property of human grammar might not be so unique after all. It also remains unclear whether it is really universal among human languages.... In 2005, the US linguist-anthropologist Daniel Everett has claimed that Pirahã - a language indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest - does not use recursion at all. This would be very strange indeed if grammar really was hard-wired into the human brain.-***-"As it happens, cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere. -***-"For one thing, Chomsky's claim is that language came about through a macro-mutation: a discontinuous jump. But this is at odds with the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis, widely accepted as fact, which has no place for such large-scale and unprecedented leaps. Adaptations just don't pop up fully formed. [This is patently wrong] -***-" Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co?operative minds. ...At last, in the 21st century, we are in a position to jettison the myth of Universal Grammar, and to start seeing this unique aspect of our humanity as it really is."-Other than the bolded paragraph, the author makes strong points to deny Chomsky's theory. I've skipped much. The article should be read in full.