Posted: Nov 22, 2010 9:50 am
Zwaarddijk wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:
How do you separate this commonality out from being a product of an innate function, and it being a function of language having common roots? i.e. Why do you think it is that the more remote a tribe is, the less "universal" their language is?
I would say the last sentence there is rather unfounded?
How so? It seems that whenever we find a new tribe that is supposedly so remote from civilisation that it has never had contact with any modern cultures, their language structure is so different that it requires a massive reworking of ideas like universal grammar to incorporate it, or in the case of the Piraha tribe, we have to accept that their language falsifies the notion of universal grammar.
This, to me, suggests that any ideas of "universal grammar" or common innate elements across cultures is a result of a shared root, rather than some innate issue. And, as Katja added, a result of the fact that there are only so many possible variations on language structures.
Zwaarddijk wrote:Uh, simply no. Skinner and behavioral psychology's theories on language predict that children must necessarily go through this phase. It's called stimulus generalisation. If children did not say "runned", then it would disprove a lot of Skinner's ideas on language. This suggestion is like saying evolution predicts that we should find a crocoduck. It's actually the nativists that should be predicting perfect understanding of grammar without a learning curve - if grammar is innate, then why do children make mistakes that need to be trained out of them?
Interestingly, some mistakes cannot be accounted for by analogy to observed behaviours (that is, not like 'past tense is formed by -ed, so run -> runned). Placement of negative particles apparently is one of these, where there basically is a hierarchy as to where the negative particle will go in different stages. I don't remember how the hierarchy goes, but nowhere can the child observe the negative particles going there, and it's surprisingly universal for not being observed anywhere outside this context.
I'm not sure what you mean? Why would we need an analogy to observed behaviors to account for it? It's not like Skinner suggested that we sit down with a kid and get him to repeat the word "runned" followed by a candy bar each time he does it...
Or, if you like, think about it this way: Skinner's ideas on language are pretty well accepted in academia, and are the basis for the most successful language therapies around at the moment; do you really think that they would be so successful if it required very intelligent people to accept a position which cannot account for such a common observation like children saying "runned" and "drinked"?
Zwaarddijk wrote:MillsianUtilitarian wrote:To me, this says that the ability to acquire language is something innately human - not any particular language, but a simply an ability for a language of some sort.
It doesn't explain why other animals can pick it up though, even when they don't share a recent evolutionary link to us or comparable brain structures..
They can't, though. Any claims to the contrary you've heard is likely a myth. The nearest any animal gets is reacting to single words.
(k, I admit, there's some syntactic or paratactic structure to bees' dancing language)
MillsianUtilitarian wrote:Animals can only acquire a rudimentary understanding of language - the smartest nonhuman apes knowing about 200 words, for instance. Saying animals can simply pick up a language is either false, or you meant what you said differently (what exactly did you mean?). Also, all infants begin assuming that pronouns can be dropped at the beginning of sentences, but later, after more exposure to languages that require them (like English as opposed to Spanish) will begin adding redundant pronouns. Sorry for the short reply, I typed this out on my phone. I hope to get into more depth tomorrow!
They aren't "claims" I've heard, they are research I've read and studied. It's true that animals don't have language at the level we do, but there are obvious reasons for why this is (i.e. our massive culture which provides our children with intensive language training from the moment they are born until they die). Despite this, we still have evidence of animals doing spectacularly well at picking up aspects of language; for example, pigeons understand grammar and successfully discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences after around 2 months of training. Compare that to children, who still struggle into their teenage years (and often beyond that). We also have other animal feats in this area, like chickadees outperforming humans in their understanding of recursion, apes using vocal or sign language at a meaningful level, parrots and dolphins understanding grammatical order to perform tasks etc.
So if the question is whether animals can use language at the level we do, then the answer is clearly "no". If the question is whether animals can understand and use language, then the answer is clearly "yes". We have so much evidence on this that it really is unarguable at this point, so whilst there are still questions over the details, the one concrete conclusion we can come to is that language definitely isn't a human-only ability.