Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 74

Now we move to the story of what I did in language acquisition, with a succession of brilliant colleagues. Many of them were called students at first, but they never were. They were just younger colleagues.

Penn's psychology department hired me in 1971, even though I had never taken a class in psychology. So I became a member of this excellent department, full of really smart people doing smart things on perception and learning and memory, and also being properly skeptical of linguistics, which I mention because there's much to be said for contact with such “outsiders” for keeping one thoughtful. I still have a visual picture in my mind of the great learning psychologist Bob Rescorla smirking politely at my more overwrought convictions about the nature of language and what we know.

After convincing myself that people know more than they can necessarily say, I still was extremely skeptical of Noam's idealization of a homogeneous speech community – sort of – which came out of that previous work that I did. And the claim that language was innate I couldn't even make out; what could that possibly mean? So I was not only an empiricist at heart, but one of my frequent sayings has always been “Empiricism is innate.”

And it certainly was with me. I'd say, What are you talking about? If you're in France, you learn French. If you're in England, you learn English. There's a sense in which it's totally obvious that language is learned from a very precise data set – sentences of English or sentences of French. Language learning comes from the outside in. But it's just as obvious that it's also from the inside out, because many of the cats and the dogs in the house are exposed to the same data set, and notoriously none of them learn English.

So if you're going to study language acquisition, a minimum first step is to distinguish between what's coming from the outside and what may be coming from the inside. An obvious way to do that is to look at what input a child receives. It's not a random sample of English sentences. Does it matter what you hear? Well, obviously, but how does it matter what you hear?

But because all my intuitions are wrong [laughter] – you know, I always start out in the wrong place. And Noam was on about how you go over to Europe on a sabbatical and your kids learn the new language and you don't, so there's something about being a child. And I thought, no, there's something about going to kindergarten and hearing kindergarten sentences instead of hearing learned sentences about linguistics.

With my colleagues, starting with Elissa Newport, we began to look at input. People were already saying that mothers speak a special kind of simplified language to their children, and that's what accounts for the learning.

Henry humorously entitled that kind of language “motherese.” [Barbara: He invented the term?] He invented the term. And Elissa Newport, for her dissertation work, began to ask if this “teaching language” really existed in the average home and what, if any, were its effects on infant learning (Newport 1975). Newport, even as a beginning graduate student, had the clearest vision of how to study, and evaluate, the effects of input variation on the acquisition function. In later years she went on to study the effects of these external influences in unusual and, therefore, revealing circumstances, including second language learning, late learning of a first language (as in some isolated deaf populations), and then how stripped‐down artificial languages are used to reveal certain universal or particular properties. More recently she's been responsible for a renaissance of thinking about brain damage and the “critical period” for language learning. Not incidentally, she became my lifelong friend. But back to her first, graduate‐school, studies of input and learning – that is, the “inside‐out” effects.

In the first study, Elissa simply went to people's houses and talked with the mother, and the little kid was on the floor playing with toys or whatever. Occasionally the mother would say something to the child. We examined those little corpora with speech to the other adult in the room, Elissa Newport, versus speech to the little kid, to see if they were systematically different – which of course they were. But we also looked at how differences in what the mothers said to their children affected the children's language development. Within the normal range of mothers, at least, few of the variations among the mothers had any effect on what was happening in the children's group – as we measured it. And we measured it in several ways.

In fact, Elissa studied these data to a fare‐thee‐well for her dissertation (Newport 1975). We were convinced that the maternal style was playing a big causal role in acquisition, so you can't imagine all the analyses that we did. Poor Elissa – she wanted to get her dissertation {finished}, but she kept getting null effects. It took us a long time to realize that that was because the facts were not as we all had supposed. That was the first hint about the relative indifference of the learner to the details of the input (Newport et al. 1977).

Today, of course, we would say that the child is so constructed as to build a grammar of an antecedently well‐defined kind, no matter what you do. This was a very primitive first step, which at least shook us a little bit loose. And that's all it could do, because it was just an observational, ultimately correlational study. Food for thought, but that's as far as we could get.