formalist approaches. Let’s examine the process of acquisition and the two
dominant models more closely.
The Induction Model
The question that has fascinated researchers for the last 50 years is not whether
language is grammatical but rather how children grasp the full complexities of
grammar with little effort and without being taught. Parents and other adults do
not teach infants grammar—they just talk to them. Nevertheless, without any ex-
plicit instruction, children can utilize most possible grammatical constructions
by age 4. By age 10 or 11, they can utilize all. Production typically lags behind
comprehension, however, and writing generally has a more complex structure
than speaking, which explains why most people, but especially children, find it
difficult to generate the complex grammatical constructions found in writing.
The nature of parental input complicates the question of acquisition. As
Chomsky (1965, 1972) observed, children manage to produce grammatical
sentences at an early age on the basis of often distorted linguistic input, that
is, the “baby talk” that adults always use when speaking to infants. Because
the utterances children produce are grammatical but are not mere repetitions
of adult speech, Chomsky proposed that humans have an innate language ac-
quisition device that induces grammar rules from limited and distorted data.
In this account, for the first 2 years of life, children’s language acquisition de-
vice is processing input and developing the grammar rules of the home lan-
guage. There are fits and starts, but then the induction is completed and the
child applies those rules consistently.
The minimalist program focuses on the role of universal grammar in acqui-
sition, but it also is an induction model based on the idea that the language
children hear from adults is impoverished. Under what he called “principles
and parameters theory,” Chomsky (1981, 1995, 2000) linked acquisition to a
finite set of innate parameters for grammar. The parameters define not only
what is and what is not grammatical but also what can and cannot be gram-
matical in a given language. Any input that does not fit the parameters is ig-
nored or discarded. Thus, even though baby talk constitutes distorted input, it
nevertheless is congruent with the parameters for grammar and is accepted as
meaningful (also see Hudson, 1980; Slobin & Welsh, 1973; Comrie, 1981;
Cullicover, 1999; Jackendoff, 2002; Newmeyer, 1998; Pinker, 1995; and
Prince & Smolensky, 1993).
One might be tempted on this basis to suggest that parents play a major role
in helping children develop grammar through their interventions when chil-
dren generate incorrect utterances. Observations of parent–child interactions,
COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 207