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The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge
by atdt 10y ago
The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age.
We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use language, even as their memory and powers of abstract reasoning are otherwise in tact.
The only way to make sense of that that I know of is to suppose that language engages some sort of specialized structures within the brain.
If such structures exist and are implicated in the acquisition of language by children across different cultures, then language must not be infinitely plastic. There must be certain structural properties that languages share that allow them to be acquired in such a regular, programmatic fashion.
Is this conclusion unwarranted, unreasonable, false, or dubious? Are there other ways of making sense of these phenomena?
- quanticle 10y ago>The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same age. Do you actually know that? Or are you supposing it because it makes sense? Given what I know about the differences in educational outcomes between socioeconomic groups in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate of language acquisition depended on the number and variety of words that a child hears. It may very well be the case that the child of the Oxbridge academics does pick up language more quickly simply because he or she is exposed to more of it.
- pekk 10y agoIt depends on which milestones you look at. Of course, if you pre-select milestones which kids hit at about the same rate, then all of those taken together will seem to approximately argue in favor of UG.
- fdej 10y agoYes. Language acquisition follows a standard sequence with specific milestones universal to all languages. For example, the period around 6-12 months is critical for phonetic learning. Before 6 months, infants are able to discriminate between phonetic units present in any language, but after 12 months they are better at making distinctions that occur in their native language and worse at making distinctions that don't occur in their environment. For example, Japanese infants are just as good as American infants at distinguishing between r and l at birth, but lose some of this ability between 8-10 months. (Chapter "Language", Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed.)