A new view of language acquisition

Abstract

At the forefront of debates on language are new data demonstrating infants' early acquisition of information about their native language. The data show that infants perceptually ''map'' critical aspects of ambient language in the first year of life before they can speak. Statistical properties of speech are picked up through exposure to ambient language. Moreover, linguistic experience alters infants' perception of speech, warping perception in the service of language. Infants' strategies are unexpected and unpredicted by historical views. A new theoretical position has emerged, and six postulates of this position are described.T he last half of the 20th century has produced a revolution in our understanding of language and its acquisition. Studies of infants across languages and cultures have provided valuable information about the initial state of the mechanisms underlying language, and more recently, have revealed infants' unexpected learning strategies. The learning strategies-demonstrating pattern perception, as well as statistical (probabilistic and distributional) computational skills-are not predicted by historical theories. The results lead to a new view of language acquisition, one that accounts for both the initial state of linguistic knowledge in infants and infants' extraordinary ability to learn simply by listening to ambient language. The new view reinterprets the critical period for language and helps explain certain paradoxes-why infants, for example, with their immature cognitive systems, far surpass adults in acquiring a new language. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the recent work and offer six principles that shape the new perspective. Historical Theoretical PositionsIn the last half of the 20th century, debate on the origins of language was ignited by a highly publicized exchange between a strong nativist and a strong learning theorist. In 1957, the behavioral psychologist B F. Skinner proposed a learning view in his book Verbal Behavior, arguing that language, like all animal behavior, was an ''operant'' that developed in children as a function of external reinforcement and shaping (1). By Skinner's account, infants learn language as a rat learns to press a bar-through the monitoring and management of reward contingencies.Noam Chomsky, in a review of Verbal Behavior, took a very different theoretical position (2, 3). Chomsky argued that traditional reinforcement learning had little to do with humans' abilities to acquire language. He posited a ''language faculty'' that included innately specified constraints on the possible forms human language could take. Chomsky argued that infants' innate constraints for language included specification of a universal grammar and universal phonetics. Language was one of the primary examples of what Fodor called a module-domainspecific, informationally encapsulated, and innate (4).The two approaches took strikingly different positions on all of the critical components of a theory of language acquisition: (i) the initial state of knowledge, (ii) th...

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“…Traditionally, this is referred to as the effect of "top-down" processing (e.g., Bruner, 1957;Rumelhart, 1980). Contemporary theorists (e.g., Kuhl, 2000;Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002) explain this effect in terms of the "entrenchment" of learned patterns. According to this view, the patterns with which individuals gain experience become entrenched, and subsequently, novel information that overlaps with the patterns is assimilated to those patterns.…”

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“…Such language-specific effects are not limited to segmental contrasts, but extend to suprasegmental regularities (see, for instance, Dupoux et al 1997;Dupoux et al 1999;Dupoux et al 2001). The current interpretation of these effects is that experience with native categories shapes sublexical phonological representations (Best and Strange 1992;Best 1995;Kuhl 2000) and that these representations are automatically activated when processing speech. In theory, all speech stimuli could be differentiated at the (non language-specific) acoustic level of representation.…”

“…Starting with Eimas et al (1971), many studies on speech perception by infants have converged on the idea that humans are born with certain universal auditory categories, possibly shared with other species, and that these categories change under exposure to the sounds of a particular language, reaching a relatively stable, language-specific state around the first year of life (Werker and Tees 2005;Kuhl 2000). In terms of our model, this represents a developmental tuning of the format of the input sublexical representation 3 .…”

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“…A number of theories have speculated that the expression of coherent and reproducible language or its elements is an inherent feature of human perception and cognition (Pinker, 1999;Kuhl, 2000;Holden, 2004;Wong, 2005). A large body of empirical and theoretical literature on word acquisition exists (Colunga and Smith, 2005;Regier et al, 2005;Garagnani et al, 2008;Cummings et al, 2009;Frank et al, 2009;Mayor and Plunkett, 2010).…”