Language Experience and Early Language Development

From Input to Uptake

Margaret Harris

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135064761
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Addresses one debate in language development, namely the relationship between children's language development and their language experience.

Chapter One

Language and the Environment: Some Evidence from Chomsky, Children and Chimpanzees

When thou dids’t not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes

With words that made them known.

The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

This book is about one of the most fundamental debates in language development, namely, the relationship between children’s language development and their language experience. The historical roots of this debate go back to the writings of Locke, Berkley and Leibniz, but the starting point for recent psychological interest in this issue was an argument that began just over 30 years ago. This now famous debate—between the arch behaviourist B.F. Skinner and the linguist Noam Chomsky—centred on the opposition of two diametrically opposed accounts of language development and it was precipitated by the publication, in 1957, of Skinner’s book, Verbal behavior.

One problem that often occurs when two disciplines collide is that there is a confusion about terminology. In the case of the debate that was begun when Chomsky took Skinner to task, there has been some confusion about the use of the terms “language acquisition” and “language development”. You will see from the title of this book—and of this chapter—that I prefer the term “language development” and it is worth taking a moment to explain why.

Chomsky’s main concern has always been with characterising the nature of linguistic knowledge and, in this respect, his preoccupations are much closer to those of a philosopher than a psychologist. He is thus interested in language acquisition, that is, in providing a theoretical account of the final state of knowledge of language that a child attains together with an account of the initial state of the child’s linguistic knowledge and an account of the relationship between the initial and final states. Theoretical linguists like Chomsky are not interested in evidence about how real children actually use—and misuse—language, since they see this as providing no evidence either about the final state or the interim states that might exist as the child’s knowledge evolves from the initial to the final state. This is because data about performance—the use of language on particular occasions-—cannot provide direct evidence about language competence. What a child—or an adult—knows about language will only be one of many factors influencing language use.

Now, I firmly believe that an understanding of theories of language acquisition is important for psychologists who are attempting to account for language development. We need to take account of the insights that linguists and philosophers have had into the nature of language, even though we are concerned with the processes by which real children attain adult language competence. As such, our concern is with language development and with the changing processing abilities that are used as children master and deploy linguistic knowledge. It would be nice to think that, in the end, the processing considerations that are of interest to psychologists may also be of interest to those who theorise about language acquisition (see Harris & Davies, 1987, for a discussion of this point). But, for the moment at least, we must recognise that the agenda of the psychologist is significantly different from that of the theoretical linguist—or the philosopher—and so our main concern must be with language development and not language acquisition.

A Historical Perspective: The Chomsky-Skinner Debate

You may well ask whether it is possible to say anything new or interesting about the profusely documented—and highly public—disagreement between Skinner and Chomsky. You might also sympathise with the view, expressed so elegantly by Bruner (borrowing from George Miller), that what we know from previous reviews of this debate “is that we shall make little progress if we adhere either to the impossible account of extreme empiricism or to the miraculous one of pure nativism” (Bruner, 1983b).

However, my reason for returning to the original Chomsky-Skinner debate is not only that I value a historical perspective (having very nearly become a medieval historian rather than a psychologist) but, more importantly, because I see the traditional opposition between nativist and empiricist accounts of language as having obscured the significance of the most important conclusions that have emerged from recent studies of the relationship between language development and language experience. This is because any suggestion that language development might be influenced by linguistic input is sometimes mistakenly seen as returning to an empiricist position that was demolished long ago.

It is is also worth noting that, over the intervening years since his original attack on Skinner, Chomsky has amplified his views on the nature of language acquisition in a series of influential monographs culminating in Knowledge of language (Chomsky, 1986). Indeed, some might argue that Chomsky had radically changed his view of language and there are interesting questions to be raised about differences between the picture of acquisition that Chomsky paints at various points (see, for example, Botha, 1989; Harris & Davies, 1987). It is, nevertheless, clear that the basis of Chomskfs opposition to a behaviourist account of language learning remains essentially unchanged.

Language and Operant Conditioning

One way to understand what it is that Chomsky still finds so objectionable in Skinner’s account of language development is to consider Chomsky’s rejection of the term “learning” as a description of the processes that occur when a child develops mastery of his/her native language. Skinner’s claim was that children “learn” language through operant conditioning. In Skinner’s view, language learning involved processes that were essentially similar to those used when laboratory animals are trained to make simple responses such as pushing a lever—in the case of a rat—or pecking at a disk—in the case of a pigeon. The essence of operant conditioning (see Walker, 1984, for a detailed account) is that it merely involves the attachment of a response to 3 stimulus through the use of carefully controlled reinforcement. It is an entirely passive process and does not involve any active learning by the organism in whom the conditioning occurs.

Skinner’s claim in Verbal behavior is that children receive reinforcement for uttering certain sounds. The reinforcement is not food or water—as for a rat or pigeon—but rather parental encouragement and approval. Skinner provides some examples of how the conditioning of children’s verbal behaviour might occur:

In all verbal behavior under stimulus control there are three important events to be taken into account: a stimulus, a response and a reinforcement. These are contingent upon each other.... The three term contingency ... is exemplified when, in the presence of a doll, a child frequently achieves some sort of generalized reinforcement by saying doll (Skinner, 1957, p.81).

The child first hears No! as the occasion upon which some current activity must be stopped if positive reinforcement is to be received or aversive stimulation avoided. When the child later engages in the same activity, he recreates an occasion upon which the response No! is strong. Upon such occasions he is especially likely to receive a generalised reinforcement for the verbal response (Skinner, 1957, p.323).

Note that both these examples concern the child learning to say single words although there are some significant differences between them. In the first case—which Skinner describes as a “tact”—the child is learning to use a word that refers to an object in the world. In the second case—that of a “man^”—the child is learning to produce a word that is associated with the cessation of a behaviour. Interestingly, as we will see in Chapter 6, Skinner’s intuition about the differences between these two cases has correlates in recent research into lexical development: The acquisition of a “man” and a “tact” do present the child with somewhat different problems. What is fundamentally flawed, however, is the claim that the acquisition of either kind of lexical item is mediated by reinforcement in the way that Skinner claims.

The rejection of the critical role of reinforcement in language acquisition formed a central part of Chomsky’s attack on Skinner. Another major concern of Chomsky’s critique was Skinner’s failure to take account of the central role of syntactic knowledge in language competence.

There has been some confusion about Skinner’s views on syntax and, in many ways, they are much more sophisticated than is often claimed. In the light of some of the caricatures that have been drawn, it is interesting to note that Skinner does make some attempt to grapple with the problem of accounting for a speaker’s capacity to produce novel utterances, albeit that the attempt is not successful. At least Skinner was aware that it was a feature of language use that had to be accounted for. Here is a flavour of the Skinnerian account of how novel utterances might be produced by using “partially conditioned frames”. You may be surprised by it, although I doubt that you will find it convincing:

Having responded to many pairs of objects with behaviour such as the hat and the shoe and the gun and the hat, the speaker may make the response the boy and the bicycle on a novel occasion. If he has acquired a series of responses such as the boy’s gun, the boy’s shoe and the boy’s hat, we may suppose that the partial frame the boy’s–––––––– is available for a recombination with other responses. The fist time the boy acquires a bicycle, the speaker can compose a new unit the boy’s bicycle (Skinner, 1957, p.336).

The Nativist Response

Chomsky was singularly unimpressed by Skinner’s notion of “frames” and much of his attack centred on what he saw as Skinner’s inability to account for syntactic productivity. Chomsky^’s main objection to the claim that language could be “learned” through operant conditioning was that the essence of knowing a language is acquiring knowledge that allows a speaker to produce and understand utterances that he/she has never heard before. In other words, whereas for Skinner the question of linguistic productivity was a secondary one, for Chomsky it lay at the heart of accounting for language acquisition. Acquiring a language involved the acquisition of a body of knowledge and, in Chomsky’s view, such knowledge was best described by a set of rules (Chomsky, 1965) or, in more recent formulations (Chomsky, 1986), by a set of principles and parameters. These rules or principles are highly abstract so that, even if a child were to be provided only with examples of grammatically correct speech, it would still be impossible for the child to extract such rules solely from experience (see the discussion of the “poverty of the stimulus” in Chapter 2).

As is well known, Chomsky^’s solution to this fundamental problem that experience could never be sufficient for language acquisition was to posit the existence of a powerful innate device that would lead the child to knowledge of language on the basis of minimal linguistic exposure. According to Chomsky, this device is present only in the human brain and it endows human offspring with a unique ability to acquire language.

As I have already pointed out, Chomsky’s main objection to Skinner’s account of language development centred round the impossibility of presenting an empiricist account of syntactic development. However, some of the objections that Chomsky originally raised in 1959—and has repeated on numerous occasions—can be seen as applying to lexical development. Chief among these is the assertion that children are not given the kind of systematic and repeated reinforcement that operant conditioning requires. Stimulus, response and reinforcement have to occur over and over again for even simple learning to take place.

Chomsky’s claim was that, far from receiving systematic reinforcement, children’s exposure to language is so unsystematic that their language experience does not even serve as a good model of correct adult usage. Note, again, that this is really a point about the inadequacy of adult language as a model for the acquisition of syntax.

Chomsky’s major objection to a behaviourist account of language is not, however, predicated upon his claims about the grammatical inadequacies of the language that the child hears. (As we will see in Chapter 2, there has been much debate about the accuracy of Chomsky’s claims about the unsystematic nature of adult speech to children.) Pushed to its limit, Chomsky’s argument is that, even with optimal linguistic input, it would still be impossible for the child to acquire knowledge of language—particularly knowledge of syntax—on the basis of general learning principles. The attainment of such knowledge is only possible because the child possesses an innate, language-specific, mechanism—a language acquisition device.

The Analogy with Physical Growth

Chomsky’s favourite analogy for the operation of the innate language acquisition device (LAD) is with the child’s physical growth. He claims that, far from involving a process of learning, language develops—or is “acquired”—in much the same way that arms and legs grow or that physical changes occur at puberty. A programme for development is laid down at birth and only a minimal contribution from the environment is required:

... language is only in the most marginal sense taught and that teaching is in no sense essential to the acquisition of language. In a certain sense I think we might even go on and say that language is not even learned ... It seems to me that, if we want a reasonable metaphor, we should talk about growth. Language seems to me to grow in the mind rather as familiar physical systems of the body grow. We begin our interchange with the world with our minds in a particular genetically determined state. Through interaction with experience—with everything around us—this state changes until it reaches a mature state we call a state of knowledge of language ... this series of changes seems to me analogous to the growth of organs (Chomsky, 1979).

Although this often-quoted analogy between the development of language and the course of puberty is a very powerful one, there is a significant way in which the analogy is misleading. This is evidenced by the fact that developing a precise formulation of the role of the environment is much more difficult than it is in the case of physical development.

The pattern of hormonal and corresponding physical changes that will occur in a child at puberty is genetically determined. The environment—particularly nutrition—may affect the age at which a child enters puberty, but it will not influence the kind of changes that occur. As Fodor (1983) has pointed out, however, this is not the case with language. The particular language that a child hears will affect the content of language development. The language environment provides data or evidence in favour of one language hypothesis—or parameter setting—rather than another (for a detailed discussion of this point, see Atkinson, 1987; Harris & Davies, 1987). So, clearly, there is a relationship between language development and the linguistic environment—what Fodor calls a “content relation”—that is different in kind from that between physical development and the physical environment, and it is to this extent that Chomsky’s analogy is misleading. Its purpose is to draw a vivid contrast between the view that language development is innately determined and the view that language development can be explained in terms of conditioning principles operating upon language experience. But we should remember that the analogy ought not to be pushed too far.

Lexical and Syntactic Development

Another point that we should bear in mind about the traditional opposition of nativist and empiricist views of language is that it is mistaken to consider language as an indivisible entity when considering the putative influence of the environment.

It is true that there are general arguments to be made about the role of the environment in language development, but there are also somewhat different points to be made about lexical development and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Language and the Environment: Some Evidence from Chomsky, Children and Chimpanzees
• 2. Language Development and Adult Speech
• 3. The Social Context of Early Language Experience
• 4. From Input to Uptake: Traversing a Methodological Minefield
• 5. What Adults Say to Children
• 6. Language Experience and Vocabulary Development
• 7. The Establishment and Development of Word Meaning
• 8. Early Language Development in Deaf Children
• 9. Language Experience and Early Language Development
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index