The innateness hypothesis

The language faculty

• language “is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a
complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without
conscious effort of formal instruction”, “a biological adaptation to communicate
information”; “people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know
how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and
does not depend on having had the right education… spiders spin spider webs
because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the
competence to succeed” (Pinker 1984)

• Throughout nature, when life or matter is organized in a hierarchical way, we see

smaller structures echoing the shape of the larger ones that contain them. We find
this property of self-similarity everywhere. A fern frond contains within it smaller
fronds, almost identical in shape, which in turn contain yet smaller ones. Lightning,
when it forks from the sky, branches down to earth over and over, each new fork
forming in the same way as higher forks, irrespective of scale… Human language is
also organized in this way. Phrases are built from smaller phrases and sentences from
smaller sentences (Adger 2019)

• Natural languages go beyond purely local structure by including a capacity for

recursive embedding of phrases within phrases… Such long-distance, hierarchical
relationships are found in all natural languages… Animal communication systems lack
the rich expressive and open-ended power of human language (based on humans’
capacity for recursion). (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002)

• The restricted number of grammatical concepts curbs the possibilities for human
language. The number of grammatically realized concepts is tiny compared to the
huge range of psychologically possible concepts (Adger 2019); Unlimited
variability…would speak against the assumption of an underlying developmental logic
guided by a specific language making capacity. But this is not what one finds in first
language acquisition. The fact that all children are able to attain full grammatical
competence in the languages they are exposed to, by interacting with caretakers and
peers, supports the idea of an underlying logic (Meisel 2011)

• Locke’s is still the dominant position on this topic for the very good reason that
common sense insists that he was right: Word meanings are learned by noticing the
real-world contingencies for their use…. How does the learner decide which
particular phonological object corresponds to which particular verb concept? …
either (a) there is not enough information in the whole world to learn the meaning of
even simple verbs or (b) there is too much information in the world to learn the
meanings of these verbs. …
• …probably the mother has different aims in mind when she tells the child to ‘look at’
some object than when she tells her to ‘hold’ or ‘give’ it. The child could code the
observed world for these perceived aims and enter these properties as aspects of the
words’ meanings. But also the mother may be angry or distant or lying down or
 eating lunch and the object in motion may be furry or alive or large or slimy or hot,
and the child may code for these properties of the situation as well, entering them,
too, as facets of the words’ meanings. … The trouble is that an observer who notices
everything can learn nothing, for there is no end of categories known and
constructable to describe a situation. … the desireability of narrowing the hypothesis
space lest the child be so overwhelmed with representational options and data-
manipulative capacity as to be lost in thought forever. At least learning of syntax
could not be as rapid and uniform as it appears to be unless children were subject to
highly restrictive principles of Universal Grammar (Gleitman 1990)

• Most studies on child language agree on the following three characteristics of L1

development: (1) Ultimate success; …all individuals develop full knowledge (I-
language of the target system)… (2) Rate of acquisition: L1 development happens
relatively fast; for example, an impressively large part of the syntactic knowledge is
acquired within one or two years, especially during the third year of life. (3)
Uniformity of the course of acquisition, not only across individuals acquiring the
same language, but also across languages… The course of first language
development is thus laid out as a sequence of linguistic milestones… L1 development
proceeds universally through an ordered sequence, not only in children acquiring the
same language, but even cross-linguistically. L1 acquisition follows a universal order…
They also behave uniformly in what they do not do; they do not make errors which,
logically, they might have done (Meisel 2011)

• …three factors that enter into the growth of language in the individual:
1. Genetic endowment, apparently nearly uniform for the species, which interprets part
of the environment as linguistic experience, a nontrivial task that the infant carries out
reflexively, and which determines the general course of the development of the
language faculty.
2. Experience, which leads to variation, within a fairly narrow range, as in the case of
other subsystems of the human capacity and the organism generally.
3. Principles not specific to the faculty of language. The third factor falls into several
subtypes: (a) principles of data analysis that might be used in language acquisition and
other domains; (b) principles of structural architecture and developmental constraints
that enter into canalization, organic form, and action over a wide range, including
principles of efficient computation, which would be expected to be of particular
significance for computational systems such as language. (Chomsky 2005)

Two problems for the behaviourist/constructionist/’tabula rasa’ approach (Skinner 1957,

more recently Bybee 2010 etc.)
1. Linguistic creativity
2. The poverty of the stimulus
(Chomsky 1988)
Linguistic creativity

a. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

b. Deep in the belly of a gigantic fibreglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.
(Atlas Obscura, Adger 2019)

Experiment: make up a sentence (at least 10 words) and insert it into a search engine with
“…”: any results?
(see Adger 2019)

The poverty of the stimulus

• A child is exposed to only a small proportion of the possible sentences in its language,
thus limiting its database for constructing a more general version of that language in
its own mind/brain. This point has logical implications for any system that attempts
to acquire a natural language on the basis of limited data. It is immediately obvious
that given a finite array of data, there are infinitely many theories consistent with it
but inconsistent with one another. In the present case, there are in principle
infinitely many target systems (potential I-languages) consistent with the data of
experience, and unless the search space and acquisition mechanisms are
constrained, selection among them is impossible. …No known general language
mechanism can acquire a natural language solely on the basis of positive or negative
evidence… Whatever system is responsible must be biased or constrained in certain
ways. Such constraints have historically been termed ‘innate dispositions’… ‘universal
Poverty of the stimulus
grammar’ (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002)

• structure dependency : (Avram 2003, Adger 2003)

a. Is [the woman who is singing] _ happy?
b. *Is [the woman who _ singing] is happy?
How do children know? No errors like in (b) attested in
child speech (Crain & Nakayama 1987) despite insufficient
evidence in input

Þif knowledge is underdetermined by learning experience

è innate
• no difficulties in acquiring interrogative inversion ó great
difficulty repeating sequences backwards ó not the same
cognitive principles (Meisel 2011)
 Arguments against the
constructivist
Evidence for innate structure: approach
a. Ansoni just heard that hei won the race!
b. Hej/*i just heard that Ansoni won the race!
c. That hei ’s won has completely surprised Ansoni.
Ø analogy not sufficient to explain Principle C of the Binding Theory: a
pronoun cannot be co-referent with a noun that it c-commands:

he
learned surprised Anson
that Anson won that he’s won
Ø analogy would predict that child would copy linear structure; child could
not identify difference unless innately aware of hierarchical structure; also,
why do children NOT start using analogy in their use of pronouns? à
Arguments against the
evidence that Principle C already learned at 30 months old (Sutton et al
2012) (Adger 2019)
constructivist approach
• apparent counterexample to Principle C:
a. nekom nkisankumkunol psite Koluskap utapakonol
hei sell all Koluskap’si cars
(Passamaquoddy)
Øhowever: right-adjoined to S à no c-command
(Bruening 2001 in Adger 2019)

nekom psite
nkisankumkunol Koluskap utapakonol

Evidence from homesigning:

deaf child David (Goldin-Meadow & Yang 2016, Goldin-Meadow 2005 in Adger 2019):
• 4 deaf Tzotzil (Mexico) siblings -> their own homesign (Haviland 2016 in Adger 2019)
Famous example of the Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN) (Senghas et al 2004 in Adger 2019):
• homesigners -> school -> created new language -> refined by each generation: a à c
à d è each generation of sign language has elements common with other
languages (a = b, d =e):

a. GIRL TAP BOY TAPPED (1st generation) b. Fémi ti Akín subú (Yoruba, W Africa)
‘The girl tapped the boy’ à Femi push Akin fall

c. GIRL (right = Su) BOY (left= O) TAP-TAPPED (2nd generation)

d. GIRL (right) BOY (left) TAP-right-left-TAPPED (3rd generation) à note presence of

Agreement
à
e. náw k’áahyîi kút yán -áw (Kiowa, Oklahoma)
st
1 man book SuAgr(1sg)OAgr(sg)OAgr(sg)-give
(Adger & Harbour 2009 in Adger 2019)

Evidence from MRI scans:

a.
b.

c.
d.

e.

e.

(Pallier et al 2011, Ding et al 2016, Dehaene-Lambertz 2017, Shultz et al 2014, Musso et al

2003 in Adger 2019)
(Adger 2019)

References:
• Adger, D. 2019. Language Unlimited. The Science behind our Most Creative Power. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
• Avram, L. 2003. An Introduction to Language Acquisition from a Generative Perspective, Bucharest: Editura
Universităţii Bucureşti
• Chomsky, N. 2005. Three factors in language design, in Linguistic Inquiry 36 : 1-22.
• Gleitman, L. 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings, in Language Acquisition 1 : 3- 55.
• Hauser, M.D., N.Chomsky, W.T.Fitch. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It and How Did It
Evolve? Science 298:1569-1579.
• Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.