ENGL 3371 Lecture 2

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ENGL 3371Lecture 2

• May 30, 2007
• Dr. Min-Joo Kim

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Is language really a human-specific phenomenon?

• Now widely held view
• Linguistic ability is uniquely human that follows
  from special properties of human brains.
• Therefore, human language can serve as a window
  into human mind.

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But this view is rather recent.

• Structural grammarians, whose thinking is deeply
  affected by behaviorism, believed that learning a
  language is a kind of imitation process.
• Only recently, generative linguists, following
  Chomsky, claimed that linguistic knowledge is
  innate. That is, were born with this special
  faculty to learn language, which he calls
  language acquisition device (LAD). And its a
  matter of time for a concrete instantiation of
  Universal Grammar (UG) to emerge.

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But which view is really correct?

• Evidence for the innateness of linguistic
  knowledge
• Effortlessness of child language acquisition
• Overgeneralization, i.e., overapplication of
  rules, by children
• The finiteness of grammatical rules
• Similarities between languages
• The critical period hypothesis (Lenneberg 1967)

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But which is really correct? Contd

• Potential evidence for the non-innateness of
  human language
• Some grammatical rules are totally language
  specific and idiosyncratic.
• There are too many exceptions to rules.
• So we have to simply memorize them.

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Evidence from the story of Genie the Wild Child

• Genies story can be revealing to the question of
  whether language is human-specific or not because
  she grow up in almost total lack of exposure to
  language as a child and then got discovered after
  puberty.

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Questions on the Genie story

• How old was Genie when she was found? How is her
  age relevant for her language situation?
• Was Genie brain-damaged at birth? If so, how
  would this have affected her case?
• What was Susan Curtisss relationship to Genie?
• When did Genie start using words?

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Questions on the Genie story

• How does Genies case compare to Victors or
  other wild (or feral) childrens case?
• Is language what makes us human?
• Do you think Genie could have had a success in
  mastering language if things had been different
  after she was discovered? For instance, what
  could the researchers have done differently to
  make that possible?

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Questions on the Genie story

• How does Genies story support or challenge the
  claim that children do not learn language through
  imitation?
• Does Genies story support the critical period
  hypothesis?
• Do you believe in this hypothesis yourself? If
  so, why? If not, why not?