Arguments from first language acquisition

In this section, we will review in some more detail the arguments that sup-port the existence of an innate language faculty in children. We will base our discussion on the brief outline presented in Chapter 2 of what we know about first language acquisition, the main characteristics of which are sum-marized succinctly below:

• children go through developmental stages

• these stages are very similar across children for a given language, although the rate at which individual children progress through them is variable

• these stages are similar across languages

• child language is rule-governed and systematic, and the rules created by the child do not necessarily correspond to adult ones

• children are resistant to correction

• children's processing capacity limits the number of rules they can apply at any one time, and they will revert to earlier hypotheses when two or more rules compete.

Universalists could not conclude from the evidence presented above alone that there must be a specific language module in the brain. These regulari-ties, although very striking, could be attributed to the more general cogni-tive make-up of human beings which leads them to process information, whether linguistic or not, in the way they do. After all, children learning maths or learning to play the piano also go through fairly well-defined stages, although not at such a young age, and not necessarily so success-fully.

However, another striking feature of child language is that it does not seem to be linked in any clear way to intelligence. In fact, children vary greatly in the age at which they go through each developmental step, and in how fast they go through each stage. By age three or four, though, individ-ual differences have largely disappeared, and the late starter has usindivid-ually caught up with the precocious child. Moreover, early onset of language is

not linked to intelligence; Steinberg (1993) states that cmany very famous people, including Albert Einstein, are reputed to have been slow to talk'.

Not only is language development not directly linked to intelligence, but it is also one of the most complex and abstract pieces of knowledge children have to cope with at such an early age, perhaps even during the entire course of their life. To give an example of the complexities of language which children have to disentangle, just consider the following reflexive sentences, some of them grammatical and others ungrammatical:

a. John saw himself. •*

b. * Himself saw John.

c. Looking after himself bores John.

d. John said that Fred liked himself.

e. *John said that Fred liked himself.

f. John told Bill to wash himself.

g. *John told Bill to wash himself.

h. John promised Bill to wash himself i. John believes himself to be intelligent, j. *John believes that himself is intelligent, k. John showed Bill a picture of himself

(Examples are taken from White, 1989, cited in Lightbown and Spada, 1993, pp. 9-10. In all these sentences, the noun and the pronoun that refer to the same person are printed in italics.)

Now imagine you are the child trying to work out what the relationship between the reflexive pronoun and its antecedent is; you might conclude from (a) and (b) that the reflexive pronoun must follow the noun it refers to, but (c) disproves this. Sentences (d), (e), (f) and (g) might lead you to believe that the closest noun is the antecedent, but (h) shows that this can-not be right either. It is also evident from (h) that the reflexive and its antecedent do not have to be in the same clause. Furthermore, the reflexive can be in subject position in (i), an untensed clause, but not in (j), a tensed clause. Moreover, the reflexive can sometimes have two possible antecedents, as in (k) where himself "can refer to either John or Bill.

These few sentences should be enough to convince you of the magnitude of the task facing children; how can they make sense of this, and invariably arrive at the correct rule?

In support of the view that language is not linked to intelligence, there is also a large body of evidence from children with cognitive deficits who develop language normally (Bishop and Mogford, 1993; Smith, 1999;

Bishop 2001). For example, Bellugi et al. (1993) studied children suffering from Williams' syndrome, a rare metabolic disorder that causes heart defects, mental retardation and a distinctive facial appearance. These

investigators demonstrated that these children show dissociation between language development and the kind of supposed cognitive prerequisites that Piaget and his followers would argue are necessary for language devel-opment. Sophisticated use of language with complex syntax and adult-like vocabulary is found in individuals whose overall mental development is otherwise very slow and remains below that of a seven-year-old.

Smith andTsimpli (1995) studied in detail the extraordinary case of a brain-damaged man, Christopher, who is institutionalized because he is unable to look after himself, but who can read, write and communicate in any of 15-20 languages:

The most salient feature is a striking mismatch between his verbal and non-verbal abilities, supported by test results over a prolonged period and with recent documentation across a wide range of different tests. The basic gener-alisation is that he combines a relatively low performance IQ with an average or above average verbal IQ.

(Smith andTsimpli, 1995, p. 4) Evidence of the opposite is also found: children who are cognitively 'nor-mal5, but whose language is impaired, sometimes severely. This condition, known as 'specific language impairment' (SLI), is characterized by lan-guage being deficient in specific ways, such as 'difficulties with productive rules of word-formation, the morphosyntactic prerequisites of feature agreement and construction of complex phonological units' (Lorenzo and Longa, 2003) (see also Van der Lely, 1998] Van der Lely and Ullman, 2001;

van der Lely and Battell, 2003). One English-speaking family has been studied recently, in which 16 out of 30 members in the last three gener-ations suffer from specific language impairment, suggesting that it is an inherited disorder, and that some aspects of language at least might be genetically controlled (Gopnik and Crago, 1991; Pinker, 1994; Van der Lely, 1996; Van der Lely and Ullman, 1996; Cook, 1997; Smith, 1999).

Recently, the gene FOXP2 has been discovered, whose mutation appar-ently leads to specific language impairment (Lai et al., 2001).

Not only does language seem to be largely separate from other aspects of cognition - although the two interact of course - but within language itself, different modules also seem to be relatively independent of one another. We find further evidence in brain-damaged adults that language is separate from other kinds of cognitive faculties; people who suffer strokes or other localized injuries to the brain will have very different symptoms depending on the location of their injury. Damage to the left hemisphere of the brain will usually result in language deficit, as in the majority of people (around 90%) it is the left hemisphere that controls

language. Moreover, the exact location of the injury within the left hemisphere is often linked to particular lands of language deficit. Damage to the region in front of and just above the left ear (Broca's area) usually results in effortful, hesitant and very non-fluent speech, with virtually no grammatical structure in evidence, consisting largely of specific nouns with few verbs, and poorly articulated. The comprehension of speech, in contrast, usually remains good. This condition is called Broca's aphasia, and is in many respects the mirror image of Wernicke's aphasia, which usually results from an injury to the region of the brain around and under the left ear (Wernicke's ^parea). In the case of Wernicke's aphasia, patients produce effortless, fluent and rapid speech, which is generally gram-matically complex and well-structured, but which is lacking in content words with specific meaning; these patients produce very general nouns and verbs, such as something, stuff, got, put or did, and their speech is so vague that it is usually totally incomprehensible. In this condition, the comprehension of speech is severely impaired.

The picture we have just outlined of the relationship between brain and language is necessarily very oversimplified. (For more detailed accounts, see for example Harris and Coltheart, 1986; Caplan 1987, 1992; Sabouraud, 1995; Jenkins, 2000; Lorenzo and Longa, 2003). Nonetheless, it shows clearly that specific areas of the brain deal with specific aspects of language, and that suffering from a language deficit does not necessarily mean having lost language completely, but usually means having problems with one or more aspects of language. Recent advances in brain-imaging techniques have also shown that specific areas of the brain are activated when using different aspects of language, although the picture is becoming more complex as techniques become more sophisticated (Carter, 1998).

All this evidence put together has been used by universalists to posit that there must be some kind of innate language faculty that is biologically trig-gered, in order to explain why language in children just seems to cgrow', in the same way as teeth develop and children start walking. An influential book by Lenneberg (1967), called The Biological Foundations of Language, outlined the characteristics that are typical of biologically triggered behav-iour and argued that language conforms to the criteria used in order to define such behaviour.

Aitchison (1989, p. 67) presents Lenneberg's criteria as a list of six fea-tures:

1. 'The behaviour emerges before it is necessary'. Children start talking long before they need to: they are still being fed and looked after, and therefore do not need language for their survival.

2. 'Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision'. It is quite obvious that children do not get up one morning and decide to start talking, whereas they might consciously decide to learn to ride a bike or play the piano.

3. 'Its emergence is not triggered by external events (though the sur-rounding environment must be sufficiently 'rich5 for it to develop ade-quately)'. Although children need language around them in order to learn it, there is no single event that will suddenly trigger language development.

4. 'Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect'. We have seen in Chapter 2 how oblivious children seem to be to correction.

5. 'There is a regular sequence of'milestones' as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of devel-opment'. In the same way as a baby will sit up before standing up before walking before running, we have seen how children go through well-defined stages in their language development, which tend to run parallel to physical development. The onset of the first words usually roughly corresponds to the onset of walking for example.

6. 'There may be a "critical period" for the acquisition of the behaviour'.

It is often argued that, in the same way as some species of birds have to be exposed to their species' song in order to learn it before a certain age, human beings have to be exposed to language before puberty in order for language to develop. This is a controversial issue; the evidence from children who have been deprived of language in their early years is difficult to interpret, as it is not usually known whether they were normal at birth or had suffered some kind of brain damage (Curtiss, 1977, 1988; Eubank and Gregg, 1999; Smith, 1999). We will examine later in this chapter the evidence that adult second language learners bring to this ongoing debate (Birdsong, 1999).

After having reviewed the kind of argumentation used by universalists in order to propose the existence of a language-specific module in the brain, which allows the child to learn language so easily and effortlessly, let us now turn to the question of what this so-called language faculty or Universal Grammar might be like.