A New Theory in Town?

Over the years this blog has reported a fair amount about the collaboration of Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, a pair of enterprising researchers determined to challenge the Cartesian theories of Chomsky et al. Let me summarize a few old posts: The Richness of the Stimulus: Discussed the two authors paper on how language is shaped by the brain. Echoing some ideas that I first encountered in Deacon’s work, they argued that instead of evolving brains that could use language, we evolved languages that were adapted to our brains. Language Adapted to Us: Continuing the previous discussion, the authors suggest that the world’s languages are easy to learn because over time languages are shorn of their hard-to-learn features. If a language is too hard for a child to learn, it disappears. This idea marks a break with Chomsky’s notion of a Universal Grammar, but did not mark a return to Skinner’s ready-for-any-lesson blackboard. Instead our brains make some writing on the blackboard easy, others more difficult. The basic unit of selection in this account is the word or a combination of words. Could Language Modules Have Evolved?: Adding to the previous work, the authors report that language changes too fast for its features to become genetically fixed in a specialized region of the brain. For example, nouns in Old English were declined, but today only a few pronouns are still declined. Noun case is expressed through word order. The change took place too quickly f...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs