Re: Cognitive Linguistics, "The Language Instinct", and High-Functioning Autistics

Eldin Raigmore, On 11/05/2006 00:43:
[...]
> I therefore suggest that there is, indeed, an "instinctual" ability that is
> used in infant acquisition of an L1.  But for the most part, it is not an
> exclusively human instinctual ability that is used.  Rather, to the degree
> that there is any exclusively human "instinct to learn an art" involved, it
> is just an incremental enhancement of the fairly common ability to
> correctly decode a stimulus -- or perhaps I should say a prejudice toward
> the correct interpretation of stimuli -- given only the extra knowledge
> that that stimulus was produced by a conspecific.
>
> -----
>
> Well, that was my main point.  What does anyone think?  In particular what
> do John Quijada and Sai Emrys and And Rosta think?  Or any other cognitive-
> types on list?
It is surely uncontroversial that there is a 'language instinct', i.e. that human
infants have a talent for learning language, which wanes at puberty. There has
traditionally been controversy over what is the content (nature and amount) of
this faculty. To my (pretty meagre) knowledge, the most egregiously
unparsimonious theories of the content of the language faculty have been
Transformational Grammar c. 1965--1992, and Optimality Theory.

> The natural next step would be for me to hypothesize what, exactly, the
> nature of that "incremental enhancement" is.
[...]
> There is a difference between "monkey see monkey do" and "baby see baby
> do".  A monkey imitates what one actually _does_; a baby imitates what one
> _intended_ to do.
[...]
> I believe a "Principle of Groundless Optimism" may be involved in infant
> acquisition of an L1.  Namely, given two possible interpretations of
> linguistic input, an infant "assumes" that the interpretation which would
> make the language more learnable is the correct one.
[...]
> Okay, again, what does anybody think?
The instinct to imitate those we admire or feel close to seems to be part of human
nature. That I think is part of the story. It doesn't explain how we learn
language, but does explain why we use it the way we do.

The main part of the story, IMO, is that language is fairly easy to learn: (a) it
becomes fairly obvious to infants that sounds correspond to meanings; (b) once
a child has grasped that, it triangulates from sound plus approximate meaning
(glorked from context and partial understanding of utterances) to work out the
set of sound--meaning correspondences that constitute the language.

So in summary, I see a need neither for imitation-of-intention nor for the
Principle of Groundless Optimism.

--And.