86 ChapTer 3 Development Over the Life Span
• Deaf children who have never learned a
signed or spoken language have made up
their own sign languages out of thin air.
These languages often show similarities in
sentence structure across cultures as varied
as those of the United States, Taiwan, Spain,
and Turkey (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). The most
astounding case comes from Nicaragua, where
a group of deaf children, attending special
schools, created a homegrown but grammati-
cally complex sign language that is unrelated to
Spanish (Senghas, Kita, & Özyürek, 2004).
However, in the last decade, some psycholin-
guists have taken aim at Chomsky’s view, arguing
that the assumption of a universal grammar isbrains are sensitive to the core syntactic features
common to all languages, such as nouns and verbs,
subjects and objects, and negatives. These com-
mon features occur even in languages as seemingly
different as Mohawk and English, or Okinawan
and Bulgarian (Baker, 2001; Cinque, 1999). In
English, even 2-year-olds use syntax to help them
acquire new verbs in context: They understand
that Jane blicked the baby! involves two people, but
the use of the same verb in Jane blicked! involves
only Jane (Yuan & Fisher, 2009).
Evidence for Chomsky’s theory that humans
have an innate mental module for language comes
from several directions:
• Children in many different cultures go
through similar stages of linguistic develop-
ment. For example, they will often form their
first negatives simply by adding no or not at
the beginning or end of a sentence (“No get
dirty”), even when their language does not al-
low such constructions (Klima & Bellugi, 1966;
McNeill, 1966.)
• Children combine words in ways that adults
never would. They reduce a parent’s sentences
(“Let’s go to the store!”) to their own two-word
versions (“Go store!”) and make many charming
errors that an adult would not (“The alligator
goed kerplunk”, “Hey, Horton heared a Who”)
(Ervin-Tripp, 1964; Marcus et al., 1992).
• Adults do not consistently correct their chil-
dren’s syntax, yet children learn to speak
or sign correctly anyway. Parents may even
reward children for syntactically incorrect or
incomplete sentences: The 2-year-old who says
“Want milk!” is likely to get it; most parents
would not wait for a more grammatical (or
polite) request.These deaf Nicaraguan children have invented their
own grammatically complex sign language, one that is
unrelated to Spanish or to any conventional gestural
language (Senghas, Kita, & Özyürek, 2004).The Chomsky school argues that because it’s hard for parents to correct their children’s syntax (even when they try),
grammar must have an innate basis. The culture and learning school argues that parents and other adults play a large
role in language acquisition.BABY BLuES © Baby Blues Partnership,Dist. by King Features Syndicate