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Grammar as a developmental phenomenon

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Abstract

More and more researchers are examining grammar acquisition from theoretical perspectives that treat it as an emergent phenomenon. In this essay, I argue that a robustly developmental perspective provides a potential explanation for some of the well-known crosslinguistic features of early child language: the process of acquisition is shaped in part by the developmental constraints embodied in von Baer’s law of development. An established model of development, the Developmental Lock, captures and elucidates the probabilistic generalizations at the heart of von Baer’s law. When this model is applied to the acquisition of grammar, it predicts that grammatical achievements that are more generatively entrenched will emerge earlier in development and will be more developmentally resilient than those that are less generatively entrenched. I show that the first prediction is supported by a wealth of psycholinguistic evidence involving typically developing children and that the second prediction is supported by numerous studies involving both children who receive deficient linguistic input and children who experience various language impairments. The success of this model demonstrates the analytic potential of a developmental approach to the study of language acquisition.

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Notes

  1. In order to make the analogy to Simon locks clear and to keep the relevant probability calculations simple, the developmental lock is presented with the assumption that there is a solution for every series of numbers on the wheels to the left of the particular wheel under consideration. A more realistic assumption would be that many series have no solution (indicating a developmental failure).

  2. This is not to say that there have to be well-defined stages. The same point could be made with a continuous model of developmental change. It is just simpler to talk about a discrete combination lock.

  3. This does not exclude the possibility that functional elements play a role in early child language. As I discuss in the section entitled “The evidence”, research suggests that children may use the presence of some functional elements to help them segment utterances, categorize nouns and verbs, and recognize sentence skeletons.

  4. Not all theories of grammar posit transformations. Some examples of non-transformational grammatical theories are Autolexical Syntax (Sadock 1991); Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan 2001). Even within these theories, though, there is a clear sense in which the long-distance dependency between a “moved” wh-word and its canonical thematic position (variously described as a mapping, sharing, or linking) is the result of a complex grammatical process.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Bill Bechtel, Cara Cashon, Fiona Cowie, Jesse Prinz, Kim Stelreny, and William Wimsatt for comments on the manuscript during various stages of its development.

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    Guy Dove

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Dove, G. Grammar as a developmental phenomenon. Biol Philos 27, 615–637 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9324-4

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