Linguistic development

Child Linguistic Development is a document that I wrote when I was at university on the stages of language development. Since Emily and Thomas are now a week short of 18 months it is time for Kerry and I to start learning about learning. I’d forgotten most of this stuff, so it will make interesting reading for me too! I’ve put a link in to kerry’s gorgeous new blog/journal, where she describes her day-to-day experiences of raising twins. Hair raising more than twin raising, if you want my opinion…

Meta-evolution – evolving the capacity to learn

The real value of a language learning (or any other kind of learning) organ, as Chomsky called it, is that its most valuable output is the _capacity_ to be so sensitive to the environment that mental processes grow to represent it. That is, the diversity of environments that humans find themselves in is so rich and varied that a hard wired and inflexible capacity would be of limited value compared to a "meta-learning" facility that develops to represent the environment the organism finds itself in.

Meta-evolution would be of more evolutionary value than just plain evolution – a learning capacity that can evolve in the real-time of an organism's life seems more valuable than the simple evolution of a set of skills and competences that must be evolved over time as environments change.

grammatical ponderings

In my notation a simple grammatical structure is represented as a triple of the form [subject | action | object] with elements of the triple annotated with gliphs to represent tense, belief etc.

One of the elements that has never satisfied me is constructions that are kind of three way sentences such as “john threw the ball to tom”
which in the notation is represented as [john | throw_p | <to, tom, ball>] It could of course be written as two statements

[john | throw_p | ball]
[ball.target = tom]

But this is a little long winded, so what I need is to be able to consisely represent such a common sentence structure using N.

Any ideas? How about [john | throw_p | [ball.target = tom]]
still makes me think that we don’t break up the meaning of the sentence in that way when we use the three way construction, so what is going on in our heads? Is there a third party along with the subject and object?

Linguistic Development

Derek’s kittens are displaying behaviour that seems to be hard wired. There is a huge range of examples of linguistic capabilities seeming to follow a strict developmental schedule — use of verbs, tenses or telegraphic speach all arrive at about the same age in children. Chomsky is the most famous linguist to claim that language, or core parts of it, are inate. His justification was that there appears to be a poverty of input in a child’s linguistic environment. Also he contended that there are syntactic regularities between far-flung languages. What it is that is inate was subject to debate though, and his proposal was that there was a deep structure to language that forms a syntactic/semantic foundation to all languages.

While this is very likely true, there is not a poverty of input — far from it. It is just not linguistic input. Reality itself is the input. This is not so far fetched as it seems. Languages are only useful if they are “representative”. They can only be that if they represent at some level the regularities that we can observe in nature. A simple example is that there is a flow of time in nature and in language. Causal structures are embedded in language, as they are in activities such as grasping and stepping. Since almost everything that we are and do must reflect the nature of reality I would guess that the deepest thing that must come hardwired is mechanism to test learned skills and capabilities against reality.

I think that there is a selective pressure on “representativeness” that applies at the core of all learning processes both physical and psychological.

A good book to read about this is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.
My undergraduate dissertation was on linguistic development A topic I find quite fascinating. And if you’re willing to wade through some horrifically turgid prose, I also wrote a dissertation on evolution in linguistic development.

I’m looking forward to the arrival of The Three to observe it first-hand.