Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning

“The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module.”

“Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things.”

“These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen.”

“The most powerful, not to mention the most beautiful, theories in science reveal hidden unity underneath surface diversity, and so this theory held immediate appeal.”

“But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.””

“Other exceptions to Chomsky’s theory came from the study of “ergative” languages, such as Basque or Urdu, in which the way a sentence subject is used is very different from that in many European languages, again challenging the idea of a universal grammar.”

“These findings, along with theoretical linguistic work, led Chomsky and his followers to a wholesale revision of the notion of universal grammar during the 1980s. The new version of the theory, called principles and parameters, replaced a single universal grammar for all the world’s languages with a set of “universal” principles governing the structure of language.”

“These principles manifested themselves differently in each language. An analogy might be that we are all born with a basic set of tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami) that interact with culture, history and geography to produce the present-day variations in world cuisine.”

“The principles and parameters were a linguistic analogy to tastes.”

“This notion of universal principles fits many European languages reasonably well. But data from non-European languages turned out not to fit the revised version of Chomsky’s theory.”

“More recently, in a famous paper published in Science in 2002, Chomsky and his co-authors described a universal grammar that included only one feature, called computational recursion (although many advocates of universal grammar still prefer to assume there are many universal principles and parameters). This new shift permitted a limited number of words and rules to be combined to make an unlimited number of sentences.”

“The endless possibilities exist because of the way recursion embeds a phrase within another phrase of the same type.”

“In practice, understanding starts to break down when the phrases are stacked on top of one another as in these examples. Chomsky thought this breakdown was not directly related to language per se. Rather it was a limitation of human memory.”

“More important, Chomsky proposed that this recursive ability is what sets language apart from other types of thinking such as categorization and perceiving the relations among things. He also proposed recently this ability arose from a single genetic mutation that occurred be­tween 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.”

“As with all linguistic theories, Chomsky’s universal grammar tries to perform a balancing act. The theory has to be simple enough to be worth having. That is, it must predict some things that are not in the theory itself (otherwise it is just a list of facts). But neither can the theory be so simple that it cannot explain things it should.”

“Chomsky tried to define the components of the essential tool kit of language—the kinds of mental machinery that allow hu­­man language to happen. Where counterexamples have been found, some Chomsky defenders have responded that just be­­cause a language lacks a certain tool—recursion, for example—does not mean that it is not in the tool kit. In the same way, just because a culture lacks salt to season food does not mean salty is not in its basic taste repertoire. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable.”

“Memory, attention and social abilities may not mask the true status of grammar; rather they may well be integral to building a language in the first place. For example, a recent study co-authored by one of us (Ibbotson) showed that children’s ability to produce a correct irregular past tense verb—such as “Every day I fly, yesterday I flew” (not “flyed”)—was associated with their ability to inhibit a tempting response that was unrelated to grammar. (For example, to say the word “moon” while looking at a picture of the sun.) Rather than memory, mental analogies, attention and reasoning about social situations getting in the way of children expressing the pure grammar of Chomskyan linguistics, those mental faculties may explain why language develops as it does.”

“As with the retreat from the cross-linguistic data and the tool-kit argument, the idea of performance masking competence is also pretty much unfalsifiable. Retreats to this type of claim are common in declining scientific paradigms that lack a strong em­­pirical base—consider, for instance, Freudian psychology and Marxist in­­terpretations of history.”

“All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong.”

“Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears.”

“Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived.”

“The theory, which takes a number of forms, proposes that grammatical structure is not in­­nate. Instead grammar is the product of history (the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next) and human psychology (the set of social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place). More important, this theory proposes that language recruits brain systems that may not have evolved specifically for that purpose and so is a different idea to Chomsky’s single-gene mutation for recursion.”

“In the new usage-based approach (which includes ideas from functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar), children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorization, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them.”

“The meaning in language emerges through an interaction between the potential meaning of the words themselves (such as the things that the word “ate” can mean) and the meaning of the grammatical construction into which they are plugged.”

“The concept of the Swiss Army knife also explains language learning without any need to invoke two phenomena required by the universal grammar theory. One is a series of algebraic rules for combining symbols—a so-called core grammar hardwired in the brain. The second is a lexicon—a list of exceptions that cover all of the other idioms and idiosyncrasies of natural languages that must be learned.”

“The problem with this dual-route approach is that some grammatical constructions are partially rule-based and also partially not—for example, “Him a presidential candidate?!” in which the subject “him” retains the form of a direct object but with the elements of the sentence not in the proper order. A native English speaker can generate an infinite variety of sentences using the same approach: “Her go to ballet?!” or “That guy a doctor?!” So the question becomes, are these utterances part of the core grammar or the list of exceptions? If they are not part of a core grammar, then they must be learned individually as separate items. But if children can learn these part-rule, part-exception utterances, then why can they not learn the rest of language the same way? In other words, why do they need universal grammar at all?”

“In fact, the idea of universal grammar contradicts evidence showing that children learn language through social interaction and gain practice using sentence constructions that have been created by linguistic communities over time.”

“In some cases, we have good data on exactly how such learning happens. For example, relative clauses are quite common in the world’s languages and often derive from a meshing of separate sentences. Thus, we might say, “My brother…. He lives over in Arkansas…. He likes to play piano.””

“Because of various cognitive-processing mechanisms—with names such as schematization, habituation, decontextualization and automatization—these phrases evolve over long periods into a more complex construction: “My brother, who lives over in Arkansas, likes to play the piano.” Or they might turn sentences such as “I pulled the door, and it shut” gradually into “I pulled the door shut.””

“What is more, we seem to have a species-specific ability to de­­code others’ communicative intentions—what a speaker intends to say.”

“constraining mechanisms vastly cut down the possible analogies a child could make to those that align the communicative intentions of the person he or she is trying to understand”

“We all use this kind of intention reading when we understand “Can you open the door for me?” as a request for help rather than an inquiry into door-opening abilities.”

“Chomsky allowed for this kind of “pragmatics”—how we use language in context—in his general theory of how language worked. Given how ambiguous language is, he had to. But he appeared to treat the role of pragmatics as peripheral to the main job of grammar. In a way, the contributions from usage-based approaches have shifted the debate in the other direction to how much pragmatics can do for language before speakers need to turn to the rules of syntax.”

“Out of all the possible meaningful yet ungrammatical generalizations children could make, they appear to make very few. The reason seems to be they are sensitive to the fact that the language community to which they belong conforms to a norm and communicates an idea in just “this way.””

“They strike a delicate balance, though, as the language of children is both creative (“I goed to the shops”) and conformative to grammatical norms (“I went to the shops”). There is much work to be done by usage-based theorists to explain how these forces interact in childhood in a way that exactly explains the path of language development.”

“At the time the Chomskyan paradigm was proposed, it was a radical break from the more informal approaches prevalent at the time, and it drew attention to all the cognitive complexities in­­volved in becoming competent at speaking and understanding language. But at the same time that theories such as Chomsky’s allowed us to see new things, they also blinded us to other aspects of language. In linguistics and allied fields, many researchers are be­­coming ever more dissatisfied with a totally formal language approach such as universal grammar—not to mention the empirical inadequacies of the theory. Moreover, many modern re­­searchers are also unhappy with armchair theoretical analyses, when there are large corpora of linguistic data—many now available online—that can be analyzed to test a theory.”

“The paradigm shift is certainly not complete, but to many it seems that a breath of fresh air has entered the field of linguistics. There are exciting new discoveries to be made by investigating the details of the world’s different languages, how they are similar to and different from one another, how they change historically, and how young children acquire competence in one or more of them.

Universal grammar appears to have reached a final impasse. In its place, research on usage-based linguistics can provide a path forward for empirical studies of learning, use and historical development of the world’s 6,000 languages.”