Chomsky's hype
Chomsky has been receiving too much hype in the past week or so. Now, more to add to his collection.
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Communicating
Noam Chomsky On The Spontaneous Invention Of Language
10.24.05, 9:00 AM ET
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in linguistics has earned him the Kyoto Prize and the Helmholtz Medal. He writes and lectures widely on philosophy, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy.
Q: If we were to take a handful of children and put them alone on an island, would they develop their own language?
Well, there are a couple of cases which indicate that. Of course, we don't experiment on humans, so we don't have an experimental answer. But there are a couple of natural experiments--which have just happened--which seem to indicate that's exactly what occurs. There's one fairly recent case, and then one from years ago.
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Some cognitive psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania discovered this by accident with a group of three deaf children of speaking parents. These children hadn't heard any language before because their parents had been heavily indoctrinated not to teach them sign language. It was thought at one time that non-hearing children should have to learn to lip-read instead of learning sign language. Apparently the parents were so heavily indoctrinated that they never even used gestures.
So the children had never had any meaningful exposure to any significant language-like information. The children played together--I think they were cousins. And when this was discovered, around the age of 3 or 4, it was found that they had in fact developed a language. When it was investigated, it was found that it had the properties of normal language for children their age. Of course, as soon as this was found they were immediately taught sign language, and the experiment was over.
There was another very interesting case with a community of deaf people in Nicaragua. For a long time deafness was considered much like a disease, and they were isolated. Kept to themselves, there was no effort to teach them. Later, there were some efforts to improve their situation slightly, and it turned out that they had pretty quickly developed a sign language within the community.
Now that language has been investigated in considerable depth, and it appears to be just like any existing language. It has the same structural properties. The infants even babble in sign just like they babble in spoken language. There don't seem to be any detectable differences. It's just that the mode is different--sign and visual, instead of articulate and auditory.
If you were asking the question about monkeys, people would do isolation experiments and that would give an answer. But in the case of humans, we have to deal with what are sometimes called natural experiments, which are just found.
-- Excerpted from an interview with David M. Ewalt on Oct. 3, 2005.
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