Bob,

I'm not sure I could have made that much clearer.  I also have not said
and would not say that the IH is not a plausible and interesting set of
claims.  It clearly is both, since it's drawn so much discussion.  And
it has been well articulated, not only by Pinker but also by Steve
Anderson.  The book he did in 2002 with David Lightfoot, The Language
Organ:  Linguistics as Cognitive Philosophy, is probably the best
account of the idea that I've read.  But we still don't know enough
about what we are born programmed to learn and how that programming
works or what it specifies.  I would argue, along with much better
qualified people like Terrence Deacon, that we have a very complex
learning function and that that function defines what a language can be,
what kind of language is learnable as opposed to what kinds might not
be.  It may be in the end, that, as you suggest, some of that learning
theory may be so task-specific as to be definable in linguistic terms,
but I strongly suspect that the boundaries between that part of our
cognitive programming and the rest of our cognition are not simply
blurry but non-existent.  That is, while we are programmed to learn
things like language quickly and easily, that programming is not modular
and is not functionally distinct from our ability to recognize faces
very quickly.  

As to the speed of first language acquisition, bear in mind that the
area of language mastered earliest and that is most difficult to master
in a second language as an adult is the accentual system.  But we come
into the world with a pretty firm command of the rhythm and melody of
our language, having heard our mother speaking it for however many
months our ears have been operating.  Changes in amplitude, pitch, and
duration will make it through all that tissue even if segmental
differences don't.  And there is experimental evidence in SLA research
now that the reason adults don't learn a second language as well or as
quickly as a child does has much to do with the fact that adults are
busy with a lot of other tasks whereas for children that is the task, or
at least a big part of it.  The notion "critical period" appears to have
hit a critical period.

As much fun as this is to argue, we're not going to resolve it.  We may
help each other clarify our views and firm up our positions, but the
fact remains that both the IH position and the cognitivist remain
seriously underdetermined.

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 12:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On innate knowledge of language

It is one thing to be agnostic on the issue of innateness, but it is
unclear what the following means.  

>>> [log in to unmask] 09/04/06 5:25 PM >>>
Neither position is sufficiently well articulated or supported by data
to be falsified.  Neither is, at this point, a testable hypothesis,
which is what makes arguing about them so much fun and so pointless. 

No hypothesis about our language knowledge is going to be proved or
disproved a laboratory setting.  However, this does not mean that we
cannot figure out certain predictions various accounts of how we might
come to know a language and determine whether those predictions are
supported by the facts.

If language is the result of some general cognitive capacity(s), then we
 have explain why these general cognitive capacity(s)  decline with age.
 Every normal child with input (and this input can be quite degraded --
see the work of Jenny Singleton with Simon)  has no trouble learning her
primary language.  The older we get it, it becomes increasingly more
difficult to learn our primary (there is very good evidence of this not
only with wild children but with deaf who are exposed to ASL late (after
the age of 18)).  We also know that almost all adult second language
learners  never attain native-like competence in that second language. 
Yet every primary language learner is able to attain this competence.  

An innate hypothesis that proposes there is a sensitive period for
learning a language predicts this fact.

Likewise, whatever the nature of these general cognitive capacities is
they must be very sensitive to linguistic input.  Those capacities have
to be sensitive to the possible sounds of human language, have the
ability to distinguish morphemes and words in a constant stream of
noise, and have the ability to figure out abstract structure from   
those item in a linear order.  

I suspect that if we ever do figure out what the general cognitive
capacities are they will have such an important specialization for
language that it will be hard to tell whether they don't constitute the
innate capacity for language.

As been observed by several people here, elementary school children have
a very complex knowledge of their primary language. That knowledge
should be used making them aware this knowledge.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

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