Patty and Bob,
We're getting a bit far afield, but it's a fascinating subject that I
don't get to debate very often, so here goes.
I didn't intend to give the impression that I think that cognitive
development is entirely dependent on language development. Cases of
severe social isolation and deprivation like Genie's are easy to
over-interpret, in either direction. But an important difference
between Genie and the deaf children Suppula writes about is that Genie
was pretty much completely deprived of nurture for her first 12 years,
with the exception of her first 18 months. Children who cannot learn
spoken language but are carefully nurtured by their parents engage in a
great deal of communication that contributes to their cognitive
development. The fact that they may not become fully fluent signers if
they don't begin to learn ASL till their teens or later does not strike
as different from the fact that a child who begins learning a musical
instrument in her teens is not likely to become a virtuoso. The
learning of certain complex cognitive and physical tasks has to begin
early in childhood for full mastery and fluency to develop. This
attests to a critical period only in a very general, cognitive sense.
But you can also see why people who think about these things may arrive
at rather different conclusions.
By the way, Bob, thanks for a very interesting bibliography. I'll spend
a bit more time there.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 10:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On innate knowledge of language and the critical period
Patty,
I agree with much of what Herb writes and the differences are not
important for K-12 education.
However, the evidence for a critical period is much more extensive than
the Genie and wild children.
>>> [log in to unmask] 09/05/06 7:52 PM >>>
As to the notion "critical period", the anomolous cases of
stimulus-deprived children, like Genie, don't prove a linguistic critcal
period. They demonstrate rather that cognition and language are closely
interdependent and neither can develop normally if the other is
impaired. Genie was cognitively severely impaired by the age of 12
because she had been denied linguistic stimulus since 18 months. By 12,
that cognitive impairment was extensive enough to severely limit
language learning.
****
I had the good fortune of being a student of Elissa Newport, the wife
Sam Suppala and sister-in-law to Ted Suppula (I think I got that right).
The Suppalas were born deaf, native signers of ASL, and trained
linguistics. Ted Suppula studied a number of deaf signers in
Philadelphia who were learned ASL late. In other words, they had no
language until they were in their late teens. Finally they were exposed
to ASL and many of his informants had been signing for 20-30 years.
Notice this was the ONLY language that some of these people had. The
issue of cognitive impairment like the case of Genie was not an issue.
NONE of these ASL learners, who learned their primary language late (in
their late teens) and had been signing for decades, looked like native
signers. Their morphology was not regular. This was the exactly the
case of Simon's parents (Simon was the child studied by Singleton whose
research Pinker cites in chapter two in The Language Instinct.) The ASL
data are not confounded by the kind of deprivation that Genie
experienced and is very strong evidence for a critical period.
(This site references a number of papers by Newport and her colleagues.
Notice the 2004 paper with Singleton.
http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/BibWeb/LiDat.acgi?AUTHORID=889)
In conclusion, there is evidence of late learners of their primary
language (late learners of ASL) who were not abused like Genie and who
do not acquire native-like proficiency in their primary language.
Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
PS. I need to obsere the ASL data are problematic for any account of
language acquisition being the result of some general cognitive
capacity(s). Except for the fact that these learners are deaf (and no
linguist to my knowledge claim ASL is not a human language), they have
no other cognitive deficit, and some of the data are based on people who
have been signing for decades and who ONLY language is ASL. This rules
out the issue of motivation.
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