As one happy result of our online discussion, I have been alerted to a very interesting, very current article on these issues. “Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition”.European Review, Vol 16, No. 4, 445-456. 2008. Elena Lieven, the author, is, according to the author note, Director of the Max Planck Child Study Centre in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester and was editor of The Journal of Child Language from 1996-2005. The abstract is as follows: “Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well—again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multi-word utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.” Some of you may find the article useful for the careful and thoughtful way she presents the dual perspectives of Universal Grammar and the alternative (constructive, emergent, usage-based) approach. In all three of the empirical studies summarized, the constructivist model seems the most in play. Here’s from the conclusion: “The structure of language emerges from language use historically and ontogenetically. Children use what they hear in order to communicate and thus come to share in a language community in terms of the network of form-meaning mappings that comprises their grammar.” She points out that much work needs to be done, including a focus on the role of “saliency, communicative relevance to the child and relationships between items in the network of connections…” “My aim here has been to illustrate ways in which a constructivist accounts would approach these issues and to argue that because these accounts are more psychologically realistic, they are likely to provide a much sounder theoretical and empirical basis for further research.” I think there are major implications. One, certainly, is that the grammar of the language doesn't seem to be already pre-wired into the brain. Acquisition depends a great deal on input, on the kinds of interactions involved. The other implication is that gramamr is not best thought of as a set of abstract, formal "rules". It is, by its very nature, functional in orientation, connected to a shared language community. I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional, emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English curriculum. For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent post, there is no performance/competence split. Craig To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/