An ecological approach to language development: An alternative functionalism

Abstract

I argue for a new functionalist approach to language development, an ecological approach. A realist orientation is used that locates the causes of language development neither in the child nor in the language environment but in the functioning of perceptual systems that detect language-world relationships and use them to guide attention and action. The theory requires no concept of innateness, thus avoiding problems inherent in either the innate ideas or the genes-as-causal-programs explanations of the source of structure in language. An ecological explanation of language is discussed in relation to concepts and language, language as representation, problems in early word learning, metaphor, and syntactic development. Finally, problems incurred in using the idea of innateness are summarized: History prior to the chosen beginning point is ignored, data on organism-environment mutuality are not collected, and the explanation claims no effect of learning, which cannot be tested empirically.

A Study of Multimodal Motherese: The Role of Temporal Synchrony between Verbal Labels and Gestures

“…However, no studies to date have systematically investigated the nature of multimodal information that mothers and other caregivers might use to convey wordreferent relations to infants. One possible reason for the lack of systematic investigation is that, until recently, maternal communication and lexical development have not been studied from an ecological viewpoint (Dent, 1990;Zukow-Goldring, 1997). According to the ecological view (E. J.…”

The intersensory origins of word‐comprehension: an ecological–dynamic systems view

“…Finally, unlike some modular approaches to language (e.g. Chomsky, 1980;Fodor, 1983), we suggest that language-specific systems are not required to account for the detection of arbitrary relations between words and referents (see Dent, 1990;Bates & Elman, 1996). Infants use the same redundant information, such as temporal synchrony and intensity shifts, to detect arbitrary relations in bimodal speech and non-speech events.…”

Steps Toward an Ecology of Writing in Digital Environments: A 21st-Century Walk Through van Gogh's Bedroom

“…He or she wrote the essay while simultaneously moving inside the digital windows displaying the 19th-century bedroom and inside the 21st-century classroom. These movements highlight Dent's (1990) and Rosenblatt's (1978) insights about text being produced as writers engage their environments in irregular and recursive cycles. This "shuttling back and forth" between compositions and opportunities afforded by their environments illustrates how the avatar-exposed writers engaged in a "synthesizing element, context, persona, a level of meaning" (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 10).…”

“…Expanding upon the work of J. J. Gibson and Yonas (1968); Hutchins (1995); Rosenblatt (1978); Dent (1990); Reed (1996) and Sprio, Feltovich, Jacobson, and Coulson (1992), our ecological approach sketches an alternative to Gordimer's (2011) and cognitivists' views concerning an author's relationship to his or her workplace and the effect on the substance of composition: we found strong evidence that an author's' interactions with and use of digital tools directly influence choices about content-especially narrative point of view and citation of references. Our findings highlight how authors produce and revise text as they situate themselves in specific locations and pick up firsthand and secondhand information from environments that are overlapping; fluid; complex; and, at times, irregularly structured.…”