194 CHAPTER 5
Acquisition and Innateness
When discussing the MP’s model of language acquisition, we saw that our un-
derstanding of how children acquire language is based on the claim that chil-
dren develop language even though they experience impoverished input,
qualitatively and quantitatively deficient. This claim is so powerful that it has
shaped the majority of all research and thought associated with acquisition.
But just what is the basis for this claim? Relatively few studies have investi-
gated this facet of language acquisition, and they report little evidence to sup-
port the poverty of stimulus model. Pullum (1996) and Sampson (1997), for
example, found no indication that parental language was deficient in any re-
spect. Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) reported that “the speech of
mothers to children is unswervingly well formed. Only one utterance out of
1,500 spoken to the children was a disfluency” (p. 89). Hendriks (2004) con-
cluded after reviewing various studies that “the language input to the child
seems to be neither ‘degenerate’ nor ‘meager’” (p. 2). Perhaps this conclusion
would be obvious to anyone who is a parent or who has observed parents, other
adults, and children interacting, for even a casual assessment indicates that par-
ents and other adults talk to children frequently and clearly. Indeed, a variety of
research leads one to suspect that some sort of biological imperative is at work,
motivating parents not only to immerse infants in language but also to modify
intonation and rhythm to ensure that each utterance is articulated clearly (e.g.,
Fernald, 1994; Fernald, Swingley, & Pinto, 2001).
The difficulty here is subtle. The MP’s universal grammar was proposed, in
part, to solve the logical problem created by the poverty of stimulus assump-
tion. If this assumption is false—or at least unsupported by the data—the ratio-
nale for universal grammar becomes questionable. Whether language is the
product of universal cognitive processes rather than a specific faculty with a
universal grammar again becomes an important issue.
In the next chapter, we look more closely at language acquisition, but at
this point we should note that alternatives to Chomsky’s formalist model do
exist. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), for example, suggested that lan-
guage acquisition is linked to the human talent for pattern recognition, not to
any innate device related to grammar. Grammar, from any perspective, is a
pattern of word combinations. Chomsky’s (1995) argument is that our ability
to internalize this pattern and use it to produce language is not only specific
but also distinct from all other pattern-recognition processes. In this view,
language represents a perfect system fundamentally different from all other
mental faculties (Chomsky, 2000).
Generally, human mental abilities are understood to have evolved through a
process of natural selection. How the language faculty could develop in isola-