I have tried to make sense of some of the claims of construction grammar.

Craig presents an interesting claim that first language learning is just like any other learning.    

>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 2/3/2009 8:15 AM >>>
   Very different sorts of approaches are being developed from the
cognitive side. I don't want to claim to be an expert, but the sense I
get is that a child learns the language appropriate to the world into
which he/she is being socialized. The child does so using normal
cognitive processes, not processes special to language.

There are some serious pieces of evidence about language that poses problems for this account.

First, and most importantly, I recommend the work of Jenny Singleton. Jenny studied a deaf child whose only input was from his deaf parents.
His deaf parents and learned sign language very late.  The sign language of his parents was, if you will, accented in the way a second language learner might speak a second language.  

Singleton was able to show that this boy's sign language was in fact more like proficient signer than his parents.  In other words, the child went beyond the defective model he had for sign.  (Pinker mentions this research in the Language Instinct.)  In what other domain, do children regularly go beyond the knowledge base of their parents?

Second, if child first language learning is the result of "normal cognitive processes," why do those "normal cognitive processes" always succeed when it comes to first language learning, but for adults are quite variable when it comes to second language learning?  I don't think anyone would want to claim that adults have no access to "normal cognitive processes" and it might very well be thought that adult cognitive processes are more sophisticated than children.  Yet, children invariably achieve greater success (as measured by how close they come to a native-speaker standard) than the vast majority of adults.  If first language acquisition is not the result of "normal cognitive processes," this well documented fact of second language learning can be accounted for.

Finally, what does it mean to say "a child learns the language appropriate to the world into which he/she is being socialized"?  This is much too limiting a statement.  We all know aspects of our primary language that have absolutely nothing to do with the world in which we live.    How is that possible?   Craig is very afraid of proposing a deficit model for our students, but to suggest that our knowledge of language is ONLY appropriate to the world into which we are socialized suggests that we can account for differences in language knowledge based on the social group we come from.  

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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