6.1.1 The “royal” experiments
What would happen if children were given no experience of a specific language? Herodotus describes an experiment conducted by two kings who iso- lated two infants from all language input to discover which language, Phrygian or Egyptian, would emerge as “the first of all languages on earth” (Feldman, Goldin-Meadow and Gleitman 1978, 354).1Although the royal experiments can- not, thankfully, be conducted anymore, several alternative forms of scientific evidence exist now regarding the role of experience in language acquisition and its precise nature.2
6.1.2 Lack of overt practice
In an infant tracheotomized at six months of age for an eight-month period, Lenneberg (1966, 233) showed that the child’s progress (beginning a day
1Campbell and Grieve 1982; Bonvillian et al. 1997. We must doubt the scientific value of any such reported isolation experiments.
2See also Lenneberg 1967, 141–142 on “wolf children”.
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after removal of a tube which had been inserted in the trachea) suggested that normal overt practice of vocalizations appeared not to be necessary for language development during this period. Some form of experience of a model occurs for these children, as long as their hearing is intact, but it is not overt production.3
6.1.3 Oral babbling in deaf children
While hearing children follow a regular course of development of babbling during the first twelve months (see chapter 8), oral babbling for deaf children may continue for at least six years (Locke 1983, 27), presumably because of the lack of a model.4
6.1.4 Language acquisition without a language model Over the last two decades, research has led us to question the degree to which a conventional model with well-formed input is necessary for language knowledge (Meier 1991).
6.1.4.1 “Beyond Herodotus”
Researchers found that a form of creative signing (“Homesign”) appears to develop spontaneously in deaf children who are not exposed to a con- ventional model of either oral or sign language.5Ten deaf children (ranging in age from 1.4–4.1 at first interview, and 2.6–5.9 at final interview) were videotaped in their homes.6Even without a model, the children “combine[d] their gestures into strings that functioned in a number of respects like the sentences of early child language” (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990a, 334). These followed a pat- tern similar to children learning languages from conventional language models:
first single gestures, then combinations into two-gesture sentences, and finally complex sentences (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990a, 339).
“Homesign” revealed systematic structural properties shared with natural lan- guage developed from a conventional model.7It showed categorization of types of signs (referentialandpredicative) and systematic combinatorial phenomena involving order. Signs are distinguished as nouns or verbs,8 e.g., “[O]ne child produced a pointing gesture at a bubble jar (representing the argument playing the patient role) followed by the . . . gesture ‘twist’ (representing a predicate)
3Results from a large survey of tracheotomized children suggest an effect of timing of the treatment during language acquisition (Locke 1993). See Lenneberg 1967 for studies of anarthria and other pathological cases; Bishop 1988; Locke and Pearson 1990 and Locke 1993.
4Lenneberg 1964a; 1967, 139–140; Oller and Eilers 1988, 441; Mogford 1988.
5These children have severe hearing losses, but have not been exposed to conventional manual languages. Although they were being trained to lipread, they “had made little, if any significant progress in their oral training” (Goldin-Meadow 1987, 108). Approximately 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents.
6Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990; Goldin-Meadow and Feldman 1977; Feldman, Goldin- Meadow and Gleitman 1978.
7See Feldman et al. 1978 and Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990 for review of research methods.
8Goldin-Meadow et al. 1994.
to request that the experimenter twist open the bubble jar” (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990, 334).9
Homesign showed complex sentence formation (involving two or more propo- sitions), including evidence of recursion and redundancy reduction corresponding to “syntactic deletion” and the mapping of underlying structure to a distinct surface structure (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990a, Goldin-Meadow 1982, 1987).
Combinatorial structure was also revealed in homesign morphology: handshape and motion combinations “formed a comprehensive matrix for virtually all of the spontaneous gestures for each child” (Goldin-Meadow, Mylander and Butcher 1995) and included inflection (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1995). Semanti- cally, communication extended beyond the “here and now” to displaced reference (Morford and Goldin-Meadow 1997). Deaf children in Taiwan (aged 3.8–4.11) provided cross-cultural replication.10
The children produced more combinations and used them earlier than their par- ents did. While the mothers were “prolific producers of single gestures, they were not prolific producers of gesture strings” (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1983;
Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990a, 344), and the mothers’ strings “did not show the same structural regularities as their children’s” (1990a, 344).11 There was a “striking qualitative distinction . . . between the signs of mothers and children” (Feldman, Goldin-Meadow and Gleitman 1978, 378), with the moth- ers frequently using objects as props in their signed actions while the children appeared to use signs more independently.
While the children did not create their homesign language “in a vacuum,” the deaf children went beyond their input, “contributing linearization and compo- nentialization to the gestures they received as input from their hearing mothers”
(Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990a, 345). Yet, when one of the homesigning children, David, was studied again when he was 9.5 years old with little exposure to a conventional sign language, he had made little progress. He had developed a system “as consistent within his own system as native signers are within theirs,”12 but it remained simple. It may be that “complexity can be introduced into a lin- guistic system only if the system is used by a community of signers who transmit the system from one generation to the next” (Singleton et al. 1993, 698).13
9 A website accompanying Goldin-Meadow 2001 provides examples: www.psypress.com/
goldinmeadow.
10In both English and Taiwanese, “gesture production was high and equal for intransitive actors and patients, and low for transitive actors” (280). Objects tend to be ordered before transitive verbs (OV) as are intransitive actors, while transitive actors are often deleted (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990b and 1998 relate this to a possible “ergative” language-like pattern).
11Chinese mothers’ gestures appeared to resemble their children’s more than US mothers’ did, e.g., in the linear order of sign combinations produced (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1998).
12The authors used aVerbs of Motion Production(VMP) test (Supalla et al. 1993, 688) in which subjects were shown short videos designed to elicit motion verbs, allowing “subject’s control of individual morphemes and morpheme categories” to be evaluated, e.g., motion, location and handshape of signs.
13This simplicity contrasted with the case of Simon, a deaf child near David’s age, who was presented with ASL in a degraded form by his late-learner parents and is reported to have gone beyond the degraded input in constructing a system with the full complexity of ASL (Singleton and Newport 1993).
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These results confirm the indomitable drive to create language in the human species, and the inherent capacity of the mind/brain to impose structure on this language, given wide variation in amount and nature of input. They suggest that children are predisposed to create language out of whatever input they receive and do so at more than one level of representation, reflecting the structure of the Language Faculty.14
6.1.4.2 A creative deaf community
In Nicaragua, we find deaf children creating their own sign language in a situation allowing shared communication.15 Although no pre-existing sign language was available in Nicaragua, individual deaf children came together each with their own homesign, and “immediately the children began to sign with each other” (Senghas 1995b, 36) demonstrating “one of the first documented cases of the birth of a natural human language,” Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl et al. 1999, 179). We find here the development of linguistic complexity over time that was missing in David’s homesign, even though there is still no conventional model (Kegl et al. 1999, 201; see Kegl 1991).
Both Homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language have shown that “[a]ll children have a special inborn ability not only to learn language, but to surpass the language of the environment when it is weak, and to create a language where none existed”;
“the source of language is within us but . . . the conditions for its emergence depend crucially upon community” (Kegl et al. 1999, 223).
6.1.4.3 Creoles
Further evidence in support of language creation without the positive evidence of a conventional language model, but with the presence of a community, is suggested by studies of the creation of Creoles, i.e., pidgin languages which become the native language of a community.16
6.1.5 Language acquisition without communication Normally, acquisition of language and acquisition of communica- tion appear to develop hand in hand, but this convergence is not necessary. For instance, “John,” at age 3.3, showed a divorce between his knowledge of lan- guage, which was normal, and his knowledge of interpersonal communication, which was “almost nonexistent” (Blank, Gessner and Esposito 1979, 329, 350).
John refused to speak with other children and teachers. His “verbalization was irrelevant to what the parent had just said” (344). When his mother asked: “Are
14David was retested as an adult at age twenty-three, after having been first exposed to ASL at age nine and then attending a college program for deaf students for two years (Morford, Singleton and Goldin-Meadow 1995).
15Kegl 1994, Senghas 1995a, b; Kegl, Senghas and Coppola 1999, Senghas and Coppola 2001. A postrevolutionary literacy campaign in 1980 brought large numbers of deaf children (over 500 children over the first few years) together for the first time in public schools (Kegl et al. 1999).
16See Crystal 1997 for introduction, and the papers in deGraff 1999, including Bickerton 1999.
you going to go in and say hi to daddy?”, John replied “OK, here we are in the garage” (344). 30 percent of the time he ignored what his parents had said.
Christopher, in his thirties, was severely deficited in non-verbal IQ: he was unable to find his way around or look after himself, didn’t conserve number, and showed severe visuo-spatial deficits (Smith and Tsimpli 1995). At the same time, “Christopher’s linguistic abilities [were] exceptional both in thespeedwith which he acquire[d] new languages and in his fluency in those languages he already [knew]” (80). He could read and write any of fifteen to twenty languages (1) and showed a “remarkable ability to translate” these (12). He showed “an attention bordering on obsession with the orthographic form of words and their morphological make-up” (82). At the same time, he had “somewhat impoverished conversational ability” (169), including a “tendency to monosyllabicity and a reluctance to initiate exchanges” (171).17
Another case, Clive, exemplifies double dissociation by revealing non-reluctant communication, but deficited grammatical knowledge. He demonstrates desire to communicate while he reveals grammatical deficit, as in: “They mean. Cold bath- ice in it. They do all the kids” (Smith 1989, 167–177). Here we see in several ways that language and communication “may have different and independent sources”
(Blank et al. 1979, 351).18
6.1.6 Language acquisition without direct perceptual input As we saw in chapter 3 (3.3.3.4), the young blind child Kelli (24–
36 months) acquired and distinguished the terms “look” and “see” (Landau and Gleitman 1985). Young children both deaf and blind can also acquire language, through vibrotactile information provided to face and neck (Chomsky, 1986 on the Tadoma method; Smith 2002a). Here we again see language acquisition which cannot be based on children’s direct perception of their environment.
6.1.7 The inscrutability of rate of language acquisition There is considerable variability in the rate of language development among children.19 Some of this difference in rate may be related to aspects of input (e.g., Potts et al. 1979), but rate differences occur in highly enriched envi- ronments as well as in more deprived ones. Although orphanage children with limited language input often suffer developmental delays, it is not clear to what degree these involve language development; “catch up” mechanisms may apply regardless of such variations.20
17Not all communicative ability was missing; Smith and Tsimpli 1995, 184. Not all grammatical knowledge was attained.
18Rees 1978; Bloom and Lahey 1978.
19Mogford and Bishop 1988, 22; Fenson et al. 1994. Consider Roger Brown’s chart (chapter 7, p. 000) showing the course of development (in MLU) of Adam, Eve and Sarah.
20Skuse 1988, 30–31 for review.
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6.1.8 Summary
While there can be no doubt that experience is necessary for language acquisition, the form of experience can vary widely. The genesis of a new language appears to require the existence of a community, but the ontogenesis of a first language in children can involve different amounts and types of communicative interaction. All normal children appear to contain within themselves the ability to create a language in spite of wide variations in experience.