According to classical theories of language and cognition, human cognition is characterized by strong universal commonalities built around notions such as object, space, agency, number, time, and event (Clark, 1973; Miller & Johnson‐Laird, 1976). Languages select from this prelinguistic conceptual repertoire the concepts that become encoded in their lexical and grammatical stock. Language acquisition, on this view, is a mapping process in which the learner needs to figure out which sounds in the language spoken in the environment correspond to which (...) concepts from the ones already in the mind (Fodor, 1975; Gleitman, 1990; Pinker, 1994). (shrink)

Poverty -of-stimulus arguments have taken new ground recently, augmented by experimental findings from th e study of child language. In this paper, we briefly review two variants of the poverty-of-stimulus argument that have received empirical support from studies of child language; then we examine a third argument of this kind in more detail. The case under discussion involves the structural notion of c-command as it pertains to children’s interpretation of disjunction in the scope of negation.

Several recent papers propose that child and adult grammars differ in their underlying representations of universal quantification, e.g., “every” in English. These proposals attempt to explain children’s nonadult responses, in certain circumstances, in response to sentences that contain the universal quantifier. Blaming children’s nonadult behavior on their grammars is questionable, however, in view of the restrictiveness of the theory of Universal Grammar, which tightly constrains the hypothesis space children can navigate in the course of language development. The restrictiveness of the (...) initial state has led to the Continuity Hypothesis, i.e., the proposal that child language can differ from the local language only in ways in which distinct adult languages can differ from each other. Advocates of the Continuity Hypothesis point out that violations of universal constraints in children’s grammars would have far reaching negative consequences, resulting in myriad ‘errors’ by children both in production and comprehension. Before embracing an analysis that involves such violations, therefore, evidence that children make such errors is needed. In this paper, we draw out the implications of a recent account of children’s nonadult interpretation of universal quantification, by Geurts (2004). We demonstrate that children commit few, if any, any of the ‘errors’ that are predicted by the account, beyond the original nonadult behavior that it was specifically designed to explain. Moreover, the proposed analysis of children’s nonadult grammar is demonstrably inconsistent with their proven semantic competence in interpreting a variety of utterances containing the universal quantifier, alone and in combination with other logical expressions (e.g., disjunction, negative determiner phrases, etc.). These findings buttress previous alternative accounts of the observed differences between children and adults, thereby leaving the Continuity Hypothesis unscathed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine W. V.Quine's theory of infants' early acquisition oflanguage, with a narrow focus on Quine's theory ofobservation sentences. Intersubjectivity and sensoryexperiences, the two features that characterise thenotion, receive the most attention. It is argued,following a suggestion from Donald Davidson, thatQuine favours a proximal theory of languageacquisition, i.e., a theory which is focused onprivate experiences as ultimate sources ofstimulation, contrary to a distal theory, where thestimulus source is located in externally observableobjects and events. (...) I use the philosophical criticismof Donald Davidson, Dagfinn Føllesdal and CharlesTaylor to suggest an alternative account of languageacquisition, which emphasises the primacy ofparticipation and joint attention to external stimuli.I argue that such an alternative theory is moreconsistent with recent studies in child developmentand language acquisition. (shrink)

The paper discusses how abduction relates tochildren's early acquisition of words, and has three sections: (a) a brief description of Peirce's notion of abduction; (b) a developmentof a hypothesis for the content-related symbolic functioning of words; and (c)arguments that children's knowledge of such functioning involves two kinds of abduction. In (b), children's knowledge of the content-related symbolic functioning of words is argued to consist in practical knowledge ofhow to use words to direct attention to kindsof things. To acquire such knowledge, (...) a childmust form a practical causal hypothesis aboutthe kind of thing to which a word directs attention. I argue that forming such ahypothesis involves abduction. On the basis of empirical work of several developmentalists, I also argue that children use abduction notmerely in forming practical hypotheses for the functioning of their earliest words, but also in forming theoretical hypotheses about core(as contrasted perceptual and functional)features of natural and artificial kinds. (shrink)