harnad@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) (12/21/90)
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal that provides Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator on this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send email to: harnad@clarity.princeton.edu or harnad@pucc.bitnet or write to: BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542 [tel: 609-921-7771] To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you are selected as a commentator. (The article is retrievable by anonymous ftp from directory /pub/harnad on princeton.edu as the file crain.bbs, however, please do not prepare a commentary unless you have been formally invited to do so.) ____________________________________________________________________ Language Acquisition in the Absence of Experience Stephen Crain University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories electronic mail: linqadm@uconnvm.bitnet ABSTRACT: A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has sought to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. Keywords: acquisition, child language, development, innate competence, grammar, language learnability, parameter theory, maturation, syntactic development, psycholinguistics.