NATIVISM

The view that language is genetically transmitted, and that children are born with an innate language faculty.

 A conflict between two views of the origin of knowledge (including linguistic knowledge) goes back over two thousand years. Plato expressed the view (Plato’s problem) that a child could not possibly, in the short time available to it, acquire the range of knowledge that an adult displays. Nativist arguments were eclipsed in the mid-twentieth-century heyday of behaviourism, when language was viewed as a habit acquired through a process of stimulus, reinforcement and reward. But they resurfaced powerfully with Chomsky’s critique of behaviourist doctrine in his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Chomsky concluded that language acquisition was only explicable if one postulated the existence of a faculty, present from birth, which supported it. The neurologist Lenneberg also argued in favour of nativism on the grounds that language shows features similar to other types of behaviour which are biologically triggered. This suggested to him that it was controlled by some innate mechanism.

 In the Chomskyan tradition, a number of standard arguments are invoked against the empiricist view that language is acquired entirely through exposure to adult speech:

Timescale. In the space of only five years, the child acquires a vocabulary of about 5000 words and the ability to produce a range of well-formed utterances, some of which it may never have heard before.

Lack of correlation between intelligence and language acquisition. All children achieve mastery of their first language regardless of variations in intelligence and in their ability to perform other cognitive operations.

1. Input: ‘Poverty of stimulus’. Chomsky (1965) described as ‘degenerate’ the adult speech from which the child supposedly acquires language. It contains all the features of natural connected speech (hesitations etc.)– including errors of grammar. It exemplifies only a limited range of the possible sentences of the language. The child is exposed to a range of speakers, with different voices, intonation patterns and accents. Finally, the input provides examples of language performance when the child’s goal is to develop competence. How is the child to build the latter solely on random evidence of the former?

c.2 Input: linearity. An empiricist view assumes that the child induces the rules of grammar by generalising from specific utterances. But Gold’s theorem (1967) calculated that this process cannot account for the way in which the child acquires the concept of structure dependency (the recognition that language is composed of sets of phrases which are organised into a hierarchy). It cannot account for anything more than a finite-state (word-by-word) grammar.

 c.3 Input: negative evidence. Infants are said to require negative evidence (evidence of sentences which are not acceptable) to show them which syntactic patterns are not permissible; this is self-evidently not available in the input they receive. Example: An infant exposed to Italian has evidence that utterances occur ‘with subject pronoun’ and (more frequently) ‘without subject pronoun’. An infant exposed to English encounters many examples of the ‘with subject pronoun’ condition, but never any of the negative rule that ‘without subject pronoun’ is not permissible in English.

c.4 Input: carer correction. Carers tend to correct facts rather than syntax (though they are more likely to repeat grammatically correct sentences). Any attempts to correct syntax and phonology produce little immediate effect.

d. Order of acquisition. Within a given language (and even across languages), there is evidence that children acquire certain syntactic features in a set order. The child also produces language for which there is no evidence in the input: for example, incorrect Past Simple forms such as goed or seed. This cannot come from adult examples; it indicates that the child is in the process of building up a system of language for itself.

 Nativist accounts of language acquisition vary widely: not least, in how they represent what it is that is genetically transmitted. Chomsky originally (1965) hypothesised that infants are born with a Language acquisition device (LAD), a mechanism which enabled them to trace patterns in the impoverished data with which they were presented. In his later work, the LAD is replaced with the concept of a Universal Grammar (UG), alerting the child to those features which are common to most or all of the world’s languages and enabling it to recognise them in the speech it hears. UG consists of a set of principles which specify the essential nature of language: they include structure-dependency and the presence of words. It also includes a set of parameters, linguistic features which can be set according to the language that the child is acquiring.

 Pinker (1994b) takes a more radical nativist view, asserting that we are innately endowed with mentalese, an internal language of thought. First language acquisition involves translating this language into strings of words specific to the language being acquired. Mentalese is abstract but closely parallels speech. The mapping between mentalese and speech is assisted by Universal Grammar which, in Pinker’s account, includes specific linguistic information such as the existence of nouns and verbs and the categories of subject and object.

There are differing accounts of the status of Universal Grammar at the time the child is born. Continuity theory asserts that UG is hard wired in the child, with all its features present from birth. They cannot all be applied at once, however, because the development of one piece of linguistic knowledge may be dependent upon another having been established and/or upon the child’s cognitive develop ment. Thus, the concept of Subject þ Verb þ Object cannot be achieved until after the child has recognised the word as an independent unit and developed the memory capacity to retain a three-word utterance.

 By contrast, maturational theory suggests that the acquisition of syntactic concepts is biologically programmed in the child, just as the growth of teeth or the development of vision is programmed.

While the nativist view still commands widespread support, alternatives have increasingly come under consideration. This is partly because research into child directed speech has shown that it is not as degenerate as Chomsky assumed. It is partly because the Chomskyan view of language as infinitely productive has been questioned in the light of evidence that pre-assembled formulaic chunks play an important role in many utterances. It is also because connectionist computer models have demonstrated that learning can indeed take place by dint of tracing patterns across multiple examples of linguistic features and adjusting the system to take account of errors.

A further problem for nativist accounts is the need to explain the concept of a genetically transmitted universal grammar in terms of phylogeny (the development of the language faculty in the species) as well as ontogeny (the development of the faculty in the individual). Chomsky has tended to favour the view that language appeared as the result of a mutation or accident. Other nativists have suggested that the brain gradually evolved to include a language component. However, brain evolution is very slow, whereas language change is rapid. This has suggested to non-nativists that perhaps it was language that evolved to fit the functions of the brain rather than vice versa.

See also: Child Directed Speech, Chomskyan theory, Cognitivism, Empiricism, ‘Less is more’, Modularity1, Principles and parameters, Social-interactionism, Universal Grammar

Further reading: Pinker (1994b); Smith (1999: Chaps 1, 3)

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The dictionary view

Dictionaries versus encyclopaedias

The encyclopaedic view of meaning

Embodiment and conceptual structure summary

Schematic systems

Semantic structure

Conceptual structure

Image schemas and abstract thought

Properties of image schemas

What is an image schema?

Image schemas