A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
students at first, but they never were. They were just younger colleagues.
Penn's psychology department hired me in 1971, even though I had never taken a class in psychology. So I became a member of this excellent department, full of really smart people doing smart things on perception and learning and memory, and also being properly skeptical of linguistics, which I mention because there's much to be said for contact with such “outsiders” for keeping one thoughtful. I still have a visual picture in my mind of the great learning psychologist Bob Rescorla smirking politely at my more overwrought convictions about the nature of language and what we know.
After convincing myself that people know more than they can necessarily say, I still was extremely skeptical of Noam's idealization of a homogeneous speech community – sort of – which came out of that previous work that I did. And the claim that language was innate I couldn't even make out; what could that possibly mean? So I was not only an empiricist at heart, but one of my frequent sayings has always been “Empiricism is innate.”
And it certainly was with me. I'd say, What are you talking about? If you're in France, you learn French. If you're in England, you learn English. There's a sense in which it's totally obvious that language is learned from a very precise data set – sentences of English or sentences of French. Language learning comes from the outside in. But it's just as obvious that it's also from the inside out, because many of the cats and the dogs in the house are exposed to the same data set, and notoriously none of them learn English.
So if you're going to study language acquisition, a minimum first step is to distinguish between what's coming from the outside and what may be coming from the inside. An obvious way to do that is to look at what input a child receives. It's not a random sample of English sentences. Does it matter what you hear? Well, obviously, but how does it matter what you hear?
But because all my intuitions are wrong [laughter] – you know, I always start out in the wrong place. And Noam was on about how you go over to Europe on a sabbatical and your kids learn the new language and you don't, so there's something about being a child. And I thought, no, there's something about going to kindergarten and hearing kindergarten sentences instead of hearing learned sentences about linguistics.
With my colleagues, starting with Elissa Newport, we began to look at input. People were already saying that mothers speak a special kind of simplified language to their children, and that's what accounts for the learning.
Henry humorously entitled that kind of language “motherese.” [Barbara: He invented the term?] He invented the term. And Elissa Newport, for her dissertation work, began to ask if this “teaching language” really existed in the average home and what, if any, were its effects on infant learning (Newport 1975). Newport, even as a beginning graduate student, had the clearest vision of how to study, and evaluate, the effects of input variation on the acquisition function. In later years she went on to study the effects of these external influences in unusual and, therefore, revealing circumstances, including second language learning, late learning of a first language (as in some isolated deaf populations), and then how stripped‐down artificial languages are used to reveal certain universal or particular properties. More recently she's been responsible for a renaissance of thinking about brain damage and the “critical period” for language learning. Not incidentally, she became my lifelong friend. But back to her first, graduate‐school, studies of input and learning – that is, the “inside‐out” effects.
In the first study, Elissa simply went to people's houses and talked with the mother, and the little kid was on the floor playing with toys or whatever. Occasionally the mother would say something to the child. We examined those little corpora with speech to the other adult in the room, Elissa Newport, versus speech to the little kid, to see if they were systematically different – which of course they were. But we also looked at how differences in what the mothers said to their children affected the children's language development. Within the normal range of mothers, at least, few of the variations among the mothers had any effect on what was happening in the children's group – as we measured it. And we measured it in several ways.
In fact, Elissa studied these data to a fare‐thee‐well for her dissertation (Newport 1975). We were convinced that the maternal style was playing a big causal role in acquisition, so you can't imagine all the analyses that we did. Poor Elissa – she wanted to get her dissertation {finished}, but she kept getting null effects. It took us a long time to realize that that was because the facts were not as we all had supposed. That was the first hint about the relative indifference of the learner to the details of the input (Newport et al. 1977).
Today, of course, we would say that the child is so constructed as to build a grammar of an antecedently well‐defined kind, no matter what you do. This was a very primitive first step, which at least shook us a little bit loose. And that's all it could do, because it was just an observational, ultimately correlational study. Food for thought, but that's as far as we could get.
7.3 Acquisition in the Face of Input Deprivation
What we decided to do with a succession of further students was to look at cases of much more radical deprivation of input. Assuming that what you learn is an infinite set of relations between forms and meanings, the input has to be forms and meanings in some way. The first thing you would think of is you hear your mother say “Blah blah blah,” and a dog walks by. So you learn that dog means “dog.” I have only begged about four hundred questions in so saying, but that's the start of the idea.
7.3.1 Deaf Children
Now, what if you have a kid who is deprived of information about the forms or the meanings? How could you study that? Well, somebody came from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf to talk to our seminar about deaf children, and we found out from them – and there's a descriptive literature on this topic – that deaf children who are in homes where there is no sign language begin to make iconic gestures spontaneously. People have studied such gestures, and maybe sign language comes from such original gestures. So this might be a route to look at the origins of language in the child and, maybe, somewhat more extravagantly than I {actually} believe, the origins of language.
Susan Goldin‐Meadow, Heidi Feldman, and I had already been convinced by emerging work from [Ursula] Bellugi and others (Klima and Bellugi 1979) that indeed sign language really was a language. We decided to look at deaf children at the stage before they get sent to “deaf school.” In those cases we were looking at, the parish priest would counsel the parents, “Don't gesture to your little deaf child, because if you do they will become too lazy to learn a real language when we send them to deaf school at the age of about five.” So here are these little children in your house exposed to no language whatsoever.
I should point out that, as with Newport, Goldin‐Meadow's first looks here at isolate language, and deaf language, transmuted into her life's work on gesture and sign; and that she too became one of this growing group of people who formed our circle of thought and continue collaborating to this day.
The first idea was to go to these children's houses and see what we could see, and it's hard to believe until you see it. In one of our videotapes, Heidi shows a picture of a snow shovel. And this three‐year‐old points to the snow shovel and produces a gestural monologue of how, when it snows, he puts on his boots, he goes outside, he shovels the snow, and so on. And he expresses himself marvelously well.
So there's step one. And you might say, if you were a minimalist, that there you go, we're done, that's language. Or you might say, well, maybe we can do more with these data.
I already believed that every verb comes with its own mini‐grammar, as per The Great Verb Game. And if these children had the same logical ideas that you and I have, then they would believe that give involves three arguments, and you map it onto language with an NP for each argument, roughly speaking. So give and sleep and eat ought to behave in different ways structurally. Now we asked (Feldman et al. 1978), for the seven deaf kids that we looked at, do they make this distinction?
Now