How children pick up a language: denying Chomsky 2 (Humans)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 07, 2016, 22:43 (2997 days ago) @ dhw

Another article which takes sharp issue with Chomsky: - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-... - "Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky's “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky's assertions. - "The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child's first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky's theory for guidance. - *** - "Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived. The theory, which takes a number of forms, proposes that grammatical structure is not in­­nate. Instead grammar is the product of history (the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next) and human psychology (the set of social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place). More important, this theory proposes that language recruits brain systems that may not have evolved specifically for that purpose and so is a different idea to Chomsky's single-gene mutation for recursion. - "In the new usage-based approach (which includes ideas from functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar), children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorization, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them. - *** - "At the time the Chomskyan paradigm was proposed, it was a radical break from the more informal approaches prevalent at the time, and it drew attention to all the cognitive complexities in­­volved in becoming competent at speaking and understanding language. But at the same time that theories such as Chomsky's allowed us to see new things, they also blinded us to other aspects of language. In linguistics and allied fields, many researchers are be­­coming ever more dissatisfied with a totally formal language approach such as universal grammar—not to mention the empirical inadequacies of the theory. Moreover, many modern re­­searchers are also unhappy with armchair theoretical analyses, when there are large corpora of linguistic data—many now available online—that can be analyzed to test a theory. - "The paradigm shift is certainly not complete, but to many it seems that a breath of fresh air has entered the field of linguistics. There are exciting new discoveries to be made by investigating the details of the world's different languages, how they are similar to and different from one another, how they change historically, and how young children acquire competence in one or more of them. - "Universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse. In its place, research on usage-based linguistics can provide a path forward for empirical studies of learning, use and historical development of the world's 6,000 languages." - Comment: Very long article which makes many points that refute Chomsky, but in no sense removes the uniqueness of human language and speech.