I have been reading the book “Children’s Thinking” by David Bjorklund for the last 4 weeks. Today I read the chapter (9) on language. Several thoughts came to mind as I read this.
1) One distinction in language is Adult-Directed (AD) versus Infant-Directed (ID). It turns out that speakers of English have lot’s of difference between AD and ID speech. While other languages have this feature, English’s is pronounced and well studied. In some ways it seems that English ID uses a grammar that is more like that of say a Latin language. Children use of words in some ways is independent of grammar. English ID represents a form of this. Since English developed later, you might be able to argue that it has a more complicated grammar. ID languages move us closer to any “universal grammar” with everything else built on that base.
2) Children exposed to second language as young children only through television do not become seem to learn any of that second language. This could partially explain why exposure to language development DVD to toddlers seems to have no positive effect (studies actually show a negative effect).
3) The arguments about the innateness of language need work in my view. My suspicion is that we have had language for quite awhile, lets say 50,000 years (a very arbitrary number). That would mean that as man moved around the globe, we saw evolution in language just like DNA changes through history. My question would be have we had a group of people who were not exposed to any language (by group I mean lets say 20 or more people), my guess is no, and therefore differences in languages are just drifts in it’s development. What we really need is a group of 10-20 toddler’s brought up with no language to see if they develop their own language, unfortunately this will be an impossible experiment, so we will never know.
4) Cognitive differences between boys and girls are measured, yet studies also show that parents interact with boys differently than girls, so we will never really know if this is social or biological.
