What is Language Development?
Rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist approaches to the acquisition of syntax
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 8 July 2004
- ISBN 9780198530862
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages572 pages
- Size 239x169x32 mm
- Weight 952 g
- Language English
- Illustrations numerous figures 0
Categories
Short description:
Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the humanities and sciences. This book presents, for the first time, an impartial account of the three dominant theories of language development. Written to be accessible for those within developmental psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, the book provides the reader with the information they need in order make up their own mind about this much debated issue.
MoreLong description:
Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the humanities and sciences. This is the first time that the three major theories in language development research have been fully described and compared within the covers of a single book. The three approaches: (1) The rationalism of Chomsky and the syntactic nativism that it entails; (2) The empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development; (3) The pragmatism of those who see the child as actively 'constructing' a grammatical 'inventory' piece-by-piece through recruiting general learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge.
The book is unique in striking a balance between broad philosophical assessment of these three theories and fine-grain, fairly technical, accounts of how they fare at the empirical and linguistic 'coal faces'.
In Part 1, the kind of psychology to which rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism give rise are described with reference to philosophers such as Fodor, Hume, and the American pragmatists from Peirce, to Rorty and Brandom. After an introduction to the syntactic analysis of the sentence, Part 2 continues with an account of the evolution of Chomskyan theory from its inception to the present day, followed by a review of developmental research inspired by it. Part 3 takes a sceptical look at connectionist modelling of syntactic development. Part 4 describes the kind of linguistic theories that the socio-cognitive approach finds sympathetic, reviewing its empirical progress (e.g. the work of Tomasello), ending with a comparison of how the generativists and functionalists tackle the evolution of syntax.
Clearly and accessibly written, the book will be an important text for developmental psychologists, linguists, and philosophers working on language.
...an important addition to the literature on first language acquisition, and could be very useful as a supplementary text in graduate seminars.
Table of Contents:
Part 1: Three psychologies: Rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist
Rationalism
Empiricism
Pragmatism
Taking stock
Part 2: Syntactic nativism: Language development within rationalism
The 'psychological reality' of the syntactic level of representation: From phrase structures to X-bar grammar
The road to minimalism - transformational grammar
The Minimalist Programme
Assessement for the time being
The question of evidence: Experiments with young children
Evidence for syntactic modularity from atypical development: children with specific learning impairment
Taking stock
Part 3: Empiricist connectionism as a theory of language development
Do connectionist representations have 'casual roles'? Two connectionist models of production
Trying to replace competence with statistical regularity: The limits and uses of cue learning
Variables: In thought, language, and in connectionist modelling
The clear utility of associative models - and more on their overreaching
Connectionism and the conceptual-intentional systems
Some new moves in modelling production
Taking stock
Part 4: The pragmatist approach to language acquisition
Two functionalist grammars
Are functionalist theories better placed to explain acquisition than generativist ones?
Explaining development: cognitive-functionalist theory and data - past and present
Is semantic knowledge sufficient or only necessary? Semantic bootstrapping versus semantic assimilation
Does an evolutionary perspective reveal the strengths of the pragmatist approach?
Taking stock
References
