Right, Right, Right!
Today I needed to respond to a post on the subject of whether language acquisition demonstrates classical and operative conditioning.
This is for a human development class, so the class has no background in linguistics whatsoever. I tried to express the argument for an instinctual component to language by
1. Saying there are infinite combinations of bad sentences, which we learn to detect without hearing and processing bad reinforcement for each of them.
2. Children know functional (as opposed to proper grammar) without actually being able to articulate even basic grammatical concepts such as what is an adverb and what is a preposition (since they are still trying to learn this stuff in middle school).
3. People can understand Yoda even though his sentences are nonstandard, and can turn around and produce yoda-ese and their friends can appreciate the fact that that is what they are doing.
The desk, my head has bashed.
P.S. In refreshing my memory for this exercise, I came across a project where they have a computer that has learned English by reading the Wall Street Journal. At least, I think that's what they were claiming. Got me thinking about the whole "written English ain't a natural language" thing again. I was mostly trying to decide whether it was worth cleaning out the con arguments from the pro section of the Poverty of Stimulus article on wikipedia. I also think organic chemistry nomenclature is a separate language so "longest English words" that are for complex molecules don't count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus#Against_the_argumentIt was interesting to see that the Human Development Textbook still names Chomsky as the star of innate language acquisition, then synthesizes it with a hybrid theory. I mean, obviously there is some nurture at play in language development or we'd all speak the same language.
And to turn this into a whole frequin' blog post, I guess the reason I didn't lead with a primary post on language acquisition is because my toddler can't talk.
