Reading 1.1 Bowerman and Levinson (2001)

Reading 1.1

Bowerman, M., & Levinson, S. (Eds.) (2001). Introduction. In Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 1-16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Melissa Bowerman (April 3, 1942 – October 31, 2011) was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Wikipedia).

Stephen C. Levinson is an influential social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, currently one of the scientific directors of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (Wikipedia).

Epistemology

This reading is the introduction to an edited book of readings on language acquisition and conceptual development, edited by Bowerman and Levinson (hereafter "the authors"). The introduction discusses epistemology from the perspective of child development, and the authors assert that this "relatively new field of investigation" is worth 'keeping an eye on'.

The authors discuss recent (mid '80s) research and techniques for understanding what infants know, and their capacity for abstraction¹. This work has paralleled studies in language acquisition (LA) including claims that LA occurs before language production².

A broader spectrum of research³ questions our understanding of universal processes, and the development of new theories is being contested.

The authors posit that while the fields of conceptual development and language acquisition have existed as separate, divergent investigations (suggesting a difference in methods;  an inability to to correlate the findings of the two fields; the marked recent evolution of linguistics; and the belief that LA is distinct from other learning by merit of it being a 'biologically-endowed special cognitive capacity') it is time to reconcile the two fields.

They suggest a common ground in exploring conceptual content as opposed to (the traditional focus of) the structural properties of language vs. thought: that there is critical similarity in the concepts of the abstract and the physical from each field. In examining how children learn, they ask two opposed questions:

1. Does understanding occur before speech? (In which case, concepts are independent of language)
2. Does speech shape understanding? (If so, concepts are language-induced)

In essence, what is the nature of the relationship between language and understanding?

The authors note that research into the relationship (or not) between early semantics/cognition is yet to occur, and suggest a number of strategies including, in part: primate studies (as primates are believed to have limited conceptual understanding but no language); exploring how children 'make meaning' outside of language; developing better methods to explore child understanding at younger ages; and discovering the commonalities between languages.

Innateness

The authors suggest that given the complexity of LA, children "must have some kind of head-start in terms of either conceptual content or learning principles" that provide prompts, else LA would not be possible, and question what the nature and degree of innateness might reasonably be. They introduce work by authors in the same volume⁴ that:

"suggest that language-specific patterns may have at least some influence on fundamental ontological categories."

They question whether, on the other hand, 'ontological assumptions' are not fixed before speech production, the learning mechanisms are set, citing the "naming explosion" common to two-year-olds⁵ before concluding this is not so - the capacity for word memorisation in young children is known to be greater than other learning, with little distinction between learning vocabulary and other concepts⁶. They highlight that a focus on the provision of "attentional and intentional cues" reduces the mystery of FLA and eliminates the need for further "special mechanisms"⁷.

The authors introduce ontological work⁸ which explores why logic problems - such as quantification - repeatedly occur for children if an innate logical reasoning exists. The work suggests that logic problems are an error in linguistic mapping; the thinking is correct while the speech is not.

They further explore Chomskyist (and other) theories on why children achieve FLA so rapidly, including "theory theory"^9, and LA and other learning as the refining and replacement of simple theories with more complex - or 'more correct' - theories as a child attempts to better understand their world. This theory is especially attractive as it proposes that language is transformative to cognition¹⁰, however the authors suggest "theory theory" may be overstated when contrasted with 'associative learning coupled with attentional biases'¹¹, and when considering the child as an active participant (and not a passive sponge) in a 'rich interactional situation'¹².

Comparativeness

The authors introduce work on the need for comparative perspectives such as those developed to compare primate species¹³ which suggest 'preconditions' for LA. This work explores both precedence and simultaneous timing in cognitive development in a healthy child, citing speech delay as an example of failure in a more fundamental area. They introduce research¹⁴ that further relates cognitive preconditions and LA, and works that examines the 'differences' between languages to better understand the authors' asserted relationship between linguistics and cognitive development¹⁵, with these works suggesting (in part) that:

• there is disagreement on whether "the naming explosion" is focussed on naming objects (nouns) or whether certain languages focus on verbs,
• children consider 'categories' from languages other than their FL as part of their "working hypotheses" of morphemes
• an a priori concept of natural grammaticalisable categories does not exist across languages
• grammatical patterns that influence non-linguistic classification exist across languages, but these do not emerge until a child has mastered the syntax of their FL
• comprehension before speech production does not seem to support a universal cognitive foundation
• differences in spatial (and other) concepts and descriptions occur between languages

The authors highlight that in the absence of ethically-unacceptable controlled experimentation on children certain absolutes cannot be determined, however research within natural family environments can be useful¹⁶, e.g. comparing linguistic development in  first- vs second-born siblings, or between twins; or the effect of attentional stimuli.

Themes

1. Advances in research into infant cognition is yet to be fully realised in LA research.
2. Advances in research into how children acquire radically different FLs is yet to be applied to research in cognitive development

These two statements appear to be at conflict. Research suggests that a degree of innateness is inarguable, however overstating innateness does not explain the existence of clear milestones in cognitive development. The authors query whether innateness as an explanation of the ability of children to 'equally' acquire greatly-diverse languages (from a presumed "equivalent base") glosses over semantic variation¹⁷.

Variations are explored further, including the treatment of nouns as 'individuated physical objects' in some languages, and be references to substances in others (e.g. flour and water in English), and spacial semantics, and the authors contend that children could not possibly be sufficiently 'encoded' with this knowledge to suit the specific language of the culture to which they are born.

The authors contend that to resolve the two perspectives (linguistics vs. cognitive development) to each other, it is valuable to query the role of language in human cognition:

"knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into a string of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects" (Pinker 1994)

They argue, however, that Pinker's view is limiting as humans can achieve higher levels of thinking through 'repackaging' or processing thoughts. And so we continue to spin in unresolving circles, with discussion on the power of language to transform thinking... 'and vice versa'. They admit that "these chapters still do not fully bridge the gap between the differing views, from nonlinguistic and linguistic vantage points, of convergence and divergence in child development", etc. They introduce the famed Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the:

"doctrine of linguistic relativity, whereby it was supposed that 'users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations... and hence are not equivalent as observers, but must arrive at some what different views of the world" (Whorf 1956)

only to immediately refute the hypothesis citing "universals in cognitive structure and processing".

Interestingly, Levinson self-references his own work¹⁸ as being "recent fact and theory" while moving on to suggest that a blend of the key approaches may be closer to reality. The balance of the reading continues to flip-flop between contrasting articles - as, I am finding, does much early reading in linguistics - and I find that the chapter has successfully introduced competing perspectives on linguistics vs. cognitive development, however the authors declared their intent to draw the fields together.

I'm afraid that, for this weary reader at least, they did not.


Following are the citations in the text, this is not intended to be a list of references:
1 Carey 1985, Keil 1989, Wynn 1992, Spelke 1993
2 Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon 1987
3 Slobin 1985, 1992
4 Carey, Gopnik, Gentner & Boroditsky, Lucy & Gaskins (same volume)
5 Clark 1993, Carey 1978
6 Bloom, Smith (same volume)
7 Tomasello (same volume)
8 Brooks, Braine, Jia, da Graca Dias, Drozd (same volume)
9 Carey 1985, Gopnik (same volume)
10 Spelke & Tsivkin (same volume)
11 Smith (same volume)
12 Tomasello (same volume)
13 Langer (same volume)
14 Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner 1993
15 Gopnik, Gentner & Boroditsky, Clark, Slobin, Lucy & Gaskins, Bowerman & Choi, Levinson, Brown, de Leon (same volume)
16 Deutsch (same volume)
17 Behrens
18 Levinson 1996, Levinson (same volume), Gumperz & Levinson 1996