Search Results

The third chapter explores the implications of the cultural evolution of language for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new and much more tractable form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). It is argued that of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier and that, more broadly, understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, linguistic or otherwise, during development requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the so-called “logical” problem of language acquisition—i.e., how children correctly generalize from limited input to the whole language—because the language itself has been shaped by previous generations of learners to fit the domain-general biases that children bring to bear on acquisition. The approach also provides insight into the nature of language universals, and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.

The apparently unified picture of language and language processing from classical cognitive science does not provide a compelling picture: the relationship between processing and acquisition is tenuous; language evolution seems miraculous. The standard defense of the classical picture against concerns of this kind is that it is “the only game in town”; there is simply no alternative framework for understanding language. But recent developments in language research mean that this defense is no longer valid. There have been important developments in a range of fields, including statistical natural language processing, corpus-based linguistics, learnability theory, functional linguistics, computational modeling, psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults, and developments in the theory of language evolution. This book provides what has been missing: a comprehensive new framework for bringing these diverse lines of evidence together to understand how language is created across multiple timescales. Chapter 1 introduces the core elements of this innovative synthesis of research on language evolution, acquisition and processing, and provides an overview of the main arguments of the book.

This book presents an overarching framework for the language sciences that may be seen as ignoring long-held theoretical distinctions in mainstream (generative) linguistics: core linguistic phenomena versus peripheral aspects of language, competence versus performance, acquiring language versus learning a skill, language evolution versus language change. The final chapter argues that breaking down these distinctions is a necessary part of building a unified account of the phenomenon of human language. Moreover, this approach creates a direct relationship between the language sciences and linguistic theory—viewing linguistic structure as processing history—as well as integrating often disconnected scientific inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language evolution. It is concluded that an integrated approach to these three intertwined timescales of language creation may, perhaps counter-intuitively, simplify rather than complicate our understanding of the nature of language.

This chapter argues that variation is a constitutive property of language use; its study allows one to explain how grammars change over time. The present discussion is concerned with the latter issue, i.e. the restructuring of grammars underlying language use. Starting from the assumption that language acquisition is a likely source of change, it is argued that explanations of diachronic changes must not stand in conflict with what is known about the human Language Making Capacity in general and, more specifically, about the Language Acquisition Device and the principles constraining acquisition. But although the individual is hypothesized to be the locus of change, it is argued that adequate accounts of diachronic change cannot ignore the fact that speakers share their linguistic knowledge with other members of speech communities. The main question pursued in this book is how core properties of grammars change, i.e. those aspects of grammars which have been shown to be most resistant to change. In the theoretical framework adopted here, this concerns principles constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), most importantly syntactic parameters.

This chapter summarizes the following using non-technical terms and diagrams: the tools with which this book has developed one version of the interactive stance; some of the main empirical phenomena that has enabled the text to tackle the topics of the book; and some of the disciplines/approaches whose concerns can thereby be linked, including Formal Grammar, Conversation Analysis, Psycholinguistics, Gricean pragmatics, Child Language Acquisition, and spoken dialogue systems.

This chapter stresses that the central problem of parametric theory is Plato’s problem (how do humans learn a language?), whereas what we may call Greenberg’s problem (what is the shape and degree of linguistic variability?) is derivative. The chapter reviews several macro- and microparameters and shows that they do not satisfy certain learnability conditions, whereby they are not plausible learning paths or plausible elements of UG. It explores a parametric approach, which conjoins a mechanism of data analysis parametrically defined (the Chunking Procedure), arguably used by the LAD to attain a morphological analysis of its PLD, and bootstrapping mechanisms that use the attained morphological analysis to specify more abstract syntactic properties of the target language, the clustering properties which standard parameters range over.

This article, written by Karin C. Ryding, argues that while Arabic has garnered increased attention by the American education system over the past decade, the sociolinguistics of Arabic are being neglected in such educational endeavours. This is despite academic research on this topic, including, notably, Yasir Suleiman’s Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives (1994). Ryding writes that the complexity of teaching and learning Arabic is related to the transcultural realities of living and working in the Arab world. As she demonstrates, Arabic is particularly challenging as the language must be modified to conform to different types of interaction. Ryding then analyses some of the shortfalls in the fi eld of Arabic language instruction, and argues that because Arabic teaching – due to its distinctive diglossic nature – lacks many traditional models to choose from, it must construct its own, which she refers to as ‘the repertoire model’. Ryding summarises by noting that sociolinguistic analyses, like those studied by Suleiman, must be taken into consideration and should force us to come to terms with the linguistic reality of multiple discourse levels and, accordingly, to develop new models for Arabic pedagogy.

The tension between rules and exceptions, and productivity, in language. Why this has remained an unresolved question throughout the history of linguistics and how it has given rise to endless controversies. A brief summary of the empirical case studies that illustrates the scope of the current project.

This chapter explores how James Joyce’s Bildungsroman disrupts the recapitulatory plot by fusing the ostensibly primitive body to the ostensibly advanced linguistic faculties of its budding poet-protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. This fusion results in repeated reversionary digressions from the progressive movement toward artistic self-realization: the very words that Stephen seeks for his art bring him instead into the realm of the sexual and procreative body. These atavistic reversions allow Joyce’s to ironize and supply an alternative to his protagonist’s desire to separate the body from aesthetic experience and artistic maturity.

Viewed from the perspective of cultural techniques the anthropological of the philosophers is an effect of the problematic distinction between different species of talking animals (parlêtres). If, as Aristotle decreed, man is an animal endowed with the gift of speech, then throughout the histories of philosophy, pedagogy, and literature this particular animal will be trailed by a host of other speaking animals (such as woodpeckers and parrots) that it has to be distinguished from—despite or because of the fact that their excluded gift of speech is always already marked as part of humanity. The chapter first discusses the theory of parrots and other talking birds in Pliny the Elder, Dante, the medieval jurists Baldus and Bartholus, and Descartes, and focuses then on the theory of the origin of language in Herder. Herder (as a philosopher) places animal sounds at the starting point of humanity’s collective entry into language, but (as a pedagogue) seeks to banish them from the beginning of individual language acquisition. Flaubert finally revokes the difference between bird speech and human language by introducing the idea that nothing can be said or written that has not been said or written before, thereby exchanging his role as author with that of secretary or parrot.

Every child is open to acquire any language in the same average amount of time at the same average age and disregard the language her or his parents acquired. Moreover children all make similar errors in all languages and these are only a subset of all potential errors they could make if this were a trial and error process. This process must then be assisted by a genetic guide: linguistics can be regarded as a theory of the limits of experience on language structure.

Chapter 3 begins with a review of research that profiles pitch perception for memory, discrimination, and reproduction in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), followed by an examination of research that supports songs and singing to assist individuals with ASD acquire language. Echoalia (a prominent feature of speech in many individuals with ASD) is profiled here to help teachers understand how individuals with ASD use language to mediate educational environments. Readers are then provided with practical background about choosing song literature and leading group singing experiences, followed by a series of practical teaching interventions that assist teachers in engaging students with ASD through songs and singing. The chapter closes with information on how teachers may use picture books that portray songs in their interactions with children on the autism spectrum as well as how to choose these books for use in educational settings.

The regularities expressed by sentences are not guided by meaning as it is clear by jabberwoki or by contradictory statements. These regularities are rather governed by structural restrictions which need to be explored on a par with other laws of nature. Unveiling these restrictions is in fact a step toward understanding language acquisition since they must precede linguistic experience in children.