How children pick up a language: Pinker's view (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, December 02, 2016, 10:42 (2912 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: David's comment: So the question of how children develop language still revolves around an innate mechanism, not yet proven.

dhw: I find the whole discussion deeply unsatisfactory. Disregarding instincts – which may be the products of cell memory – how do any organisms learn? By experience and by copying, and by remembering what they have experienced and copied. In learning human language, the child copies the human sounds it hears, just as the cub and the calf and all other offspring will copy their particular animal sounds, gestures and other forms of behaviour, and the feral child will copy the language of the animal foster parent. We know that human language is vastly more complex than the grunts and gestures of our ancestors. So what? The process of learning is the same. What is innate is the ability, not just to learn language but simply to learn. And what is universal is not some mysterious grammar but the fact that every human society has created its own mass of sounds/words/structures to communicate whatever information becomes available to our enhanced consciousness. Hence the many different, often totally unrelated languages. “Innate structure”? Well, every human language consists of words strung together in a meaningful fashion. And every child that learns a particular language will learn the particular words and the particular ways they are strung together. And every child that learns this will have done so by copying and remembering. It’s a process of learning that is common practice throughout the animal world!

DAVID: I agree about learning ability.The argument revolves about the fact that close to 99% of all languages have the same structural grammar with recursive sentences and only a very few don't.

What do you mean by “the same structural grammar” and “recursive sentences”? I repeat: “every human language consists of words strung together in a meaningful fashion. And every child that learns a particular language will learn the particular words and the particular ways they are strung together.” That is the nub of “grammar” and “recursion”, as they have evolved since different sets of humans first invented different sets of new sounds and created different ways of linking those sounds together. Human language is not a collective unit. It is a mass of individual details. And having spent a lifetime explaining the rules of English grammar to people who are used to a different grammar (and in many cases also to native speakers who don’t have a clue about grammar), I regard the very idea of a universal grammar as a joke, even down to the use of the word “grammar”. Yes, most languages have nouns and verbs and adjectives. That’s about it.

DAVID: And children can learn any one, two or three languages quickly up until age eight and then lose the ability. Why? Questions raised and not answered.

My suggestion: the more you learn of one language, the more it will interfere with learning another. If a child begins by learning that its toy can be called a “Spielzeug” or a “jouet”, depending on the addressee, he/she has not yet learned that a toy is called a toy and nothing else. The older you get, the more channelled you become, because the restricted information has become embedded. But even with small children, the amount that can be learned depends on the degree of receptive and imitative intelligence. Some children can grow up bilingual, but others can get confused. The ability to learn is just as individual in children as in adults.