Marty -
The comment by Gordon Wells is interesting indeed -- thanks for passing it
along. I have noticed that theories invoking a dynamic "self-organizing"
biological person/mind/brain are getting more play in studies of motor
development nowadays, with the emphasis on getting beyond the remaining
traces of the traditional "nature/nurture" opposition in favor of a
dynamic, interactional theory of human development. (Hardly unfamiliar
intellectual terrain for a long-time semiotic interactionist like you!)
There are also sound structure researchers in linguistics these days who
are looking at how sound/speech perception in infancy may help very young
children begin discovering structural principles in language. Some sound
structure folks claim, for example, that hearing the conventional
intonational contour of phrases and clauses may help infants begin to learn
the structural boundaries of utterance units and perhaps even of
syntactically relevant sub-units. (Peter Jusczyk describes this work in
chapter 6 of his book, The Discovery of Spoken Language, MIT Press, 1997.)
Still interesting from the Chomsky-influenced era, I think, is the idea
that prior contraints in the neurological system are empowering for the
initial phases of development. This idea, it seems to me, suggests one of
that era's potentially enduring contributions: an emphasis on systemic
constraint as productive, even generative, for language acquisition.
Evolutionary theory, then, becomes a way to think about the biological
history of systemic constraint. The more naive (or more purely
deterministic) view of "evolutionary psychology" (which in some respects
strikes me as re-cast sociobiology, though most people don't want to admit
it) often misses or underplays the point that systemic constraint must
always express itself in dynamic interaction with experience.
I'm not sure the rules/not-rules debate in language acquisition circles
gets to the heart of the issue. Systemic constraints, or their "products"
in behavioral patterns, can perhaps be described in terms of rules, but
that's really a convention of mathematics that seems to apply better in
physics than in biology, such as I understand any of it. The version of the
familiar Chomsky-era claim that I find durable runs something like this:
If the human infant is somehow oriented to, or simply inclined toward,
certains ways of allocating attention and certain ways of interpretating
sensory experience (and thus certain kinds of representations-for-oneself,
which in turn frame subsequent allocations of attention and subsequent
interpretations), the infant can begin learning a flexible and complex
system of meanings and structures more quickly and with less sensory "data"
than would seem possible if the infant didn't begin with an orientation or
inclination. To call the orientation or inclination a "Language
Acquisition Device" or a "Language Organ" or even a specific location in
the brain is probably best understood as a provisional reifying/stabilizing
move in theory -- a bit like postulating the ZPD as an entity, a "place."
Metaphors help; in fact, we can't do without them. But they also get in
the way.
___________________________
Robert Gundlach
Northwestern University
1902 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
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r-gundlach who-is-at nwu.edu
Martin Nystrand
Professor, Department of English (608 263-3820)
Editor, Written Communication (608 263-4512)
Director, Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA)
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
685 Education Sciences
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