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

by David Turell , Saturday, December 03, 2016, 00:48 (2911 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: “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!

I'm not knowledgeable enough to debate this. All some of the experts show is that most languages have the same structure, but I do have a comment below about bilingual kids.

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.

dhw: What do you mean by “the same structural grammar” and “recursive sentences”.

Recursive sentences are common in most languages and they include a secondary thought mixed into the flow of the sentence, the point of Chomsky's theory. I'm just stating the arguments in the articles. I agree we learn our language, but is there an underling built-in grammar is the question, not settled..

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.

dhw:Some children can grow up bilingual, but others can get confused. The ability to learn is just as individual in children as in adults.

I live in a bilingual state, and I see all little Latin kids speaking beautiful English and Spanish without accents if they start young enough, and I've met a few with three languages that way if they have a bilingual parent who uses the third language with them from the beginning, and they differentiate the languages without difficulty as they learn them together, described in articles I've read. This suggests an underlying language structure of some sort.