INSIDER: What’s currently going on in your fields of specialty, Construction Grammar and Language Acquisition in Young Children?

There has been a definite shift in linguistics toward the concept that humans learn language, rather than it being innate, as proposed by Noam Chomsky. Under Chomsky, the differences among languages were considered to be superficial because humans had been thought to be born with abstract knowledge of language, in the form of a language gene, if you will. In other words, humans were thought to acquire language automatically with only minimal exposure.

The field is changing in that we are beginning to recognize just how rich language input really is. We also know that people have impressive abilities to categorize and learn from the input. The Construction Grammar approach suggests that the “big picture” is the specifics of what you have heard and the generalizations that you are able to make from these. This allows for very real differences among languages.

What do speakers of a given language have to know, and what can they ‘figure out’ on the basis of that knowledge, in order to use their language successfully?

Editor’s Note: “At the heart of what shapes Construction Grammar is the following question: what do speakers of a given language have to know and what can they ‘figure out’ on the basis of that knowledge, in order for them to use their language successfully? The appeal of Construction Grammar as a holistic and usage-based framework lies in its commitment to treat all types of expressions as equally central to capturing grammatical patterning (i.e. without assuming that certain forms are more ‘basic’ than others) and in viewing all dimensions of language (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, morphology, phonology, prosody) as equal contributors to shaping linguistic expressions.” [Excerpted from http://www.constructiongrammar.org/]

INSIDER: How are you applying this theory to language acquisition in children?

There is no language gene, as theorized by Chomsky.

There’s a growing effort to show that language is learned through a lot of input from which generalizations are made, and many experiments are going on right now. Work done at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany by Mike Tomasello and Elena Lieven and their colleagues and students have demonstrated that children are quite conservative in their language learning, preferring to stick closely to the forms that they hear others using in their environment.

In my own lab, we are investigating how children learn language from the input, with special attention being paid to facilitory factors. We have found that children can actually learn to comprehend novel linguistic patterns quite quickly. Our interpretation of the data is that language-learning is like other forms of categorization.

The ability to generalize or categorize is a key component of language-learning.

In other words, What’s a chair? What’s a baby? You see and experience chairs and babies in many different instances and forms, but none are completely the same – different colors, different light, different materials, different ages, etc. Your brain sees the differences, but it generalizes over them to figure out that the object/person in front of you is a chair or a baby. This ability to generalize or categorize is a key component of language-learning.

Unfortunately, there has not been a lot of solid work done in this area with bilingual children. The field of bilingualism is a bit behind the curve, with many people still stuck in the Chomsky model. Also, there are so many factors to account for when working with bilingual (or multilingual) children, e.g., the age(s) at which the child has learned her languages, the type and amount of input that she has had, etc. There has been a study done on code-switching, the process whereby people combine one part of a sentence in one language with another part in a second language in the same sentence. It appears that people combine stored chunks, but don’t blend them. [Backus, Ad. 2003. “Units in Code-switching: Evidence for Multimorphemic Elements in the Lexicon,” Linguistics 41, pages 83-132.]

The next ten years will prove to be a truly exciting time for linguistics vis-à-vis the study of the brain.

And perhaps most interesting of all, we really don’t know where the pieces are connected in the brain that actually control all of this. However, the next ten years will prove to be a truly exciting time as we are able to expand our understanding of how the brain physically affects language and vice-versa.

INSIDER: If humans are no longer set apart from other animals by their language gene or language organ, as Chomsky expressed it, why don’t animals speak in the same way as humans?

Why don't animals speak in the same way as humans?

A fascinating question. For many years, the thinking behind Chomsky’s language gene or language organ meant that humans were set apart from other living beings in terms of their language abilities. Since this newer approach suggests that language is learned from the environment, one has to ask why animals, exposed to the same environment, do not learn language in the same way as humans.

Humans are actually much better imitators than are other primates.

Several interesting ideas have been proposed. For example, Tomasello has observed that chimps do not point. And that’s what language does – it points something out. It seems chimps do not have the same ability as humans to understand that they can direct another’s attention, and this is clearly crucial to language. Humans are also actually much better imitators than are other primates.

Certain autistic children appear to have impairments in their ability to understand that they can direct another’s attention as well. The consequence for these children is that they will often have severe problems learning language. The ability to understand that one can manipulate another’s mind and the ability to imitate are clearly key to humans’ ability to communicate.

INSIDER: What are the current challenges in your field?

There are two. The first is the challenge to be concrete about how languages are learned from the input. Chomsky’s questions are valid, i.e., the learning involved is non-trivial. In other words, you don’t generalize everything.

Although languages can vary quite a bit, they do not vary completely randomly.

The second challenge is how to explain why there are generalizations across languages, although there are not as many as one might think. Some might describe the Chomskyian view of language with the following joke. A mathematician, a physicist and a linguist are trying to decide if all odd numbers are prime. The mathematician says, “One’s prime, 3’s prime, 5’s prime, 7’s prime, 9’s not prime, so no.” The physicist says, “One’s prime, 3’s prime, 5’s prime, 7’s prime, 9’s not prime, but maybe that’s due to experimental error.” The (Chomskyian) linguist says, “One’s prime, 3’s prime, 5’s prime, 7’s prime. Aha! We have a universal generalization. Nine doesn’t seem to be prime, but it MUST be prime at some underlying level of representation!”

But all joking aside, there do exist certain generalizations that require explanation. Another aim of my research is to account for the cross-linguistic generalizations that exist. Although languages can vary quite a bit, they do not vary completely randomly. My work seeks to find general cognitive explanations for the generalizations.

Is the cup northwest or left of the plate?

Under Chomsky, there were thought to be no culturally related constraints. Ideas suggested by Sapir and Whorf regarding how language affects thought were disregarded. However, the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that language can affect thought is now being ressurected. Steve Levinson and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Niejmegen have done some interesting work on how language differences do appear to affect non-linguistic behavior. Some languages exist that routinely describe spatial locations using an absolute system of reference (e.g., by refering to North, South, East and West). In English, we are much more likely to refer to nearby objects in terms of their relative locations (e.g, by referring to left, right, front, back). Levinson had speakers of both absolute and relative spatial systems replace objects they had seen in a particular configuration ‘the same way” after turning the subjects around. He found that speakers of absolute spatial languages were much more likely to configure the objects so as to preserve their absolute alignments (the cup remaining to the north of the stick), whereas English-speakers were much more likely to configure the objects in relative terms (e.g., the cup remaining to the left of the stick).

INSIDER: How do you find children to take part in your experiments?

Princeton has an infrastructure to support us in finding children to participate. At this point, we only recruit fluent English speakers, since we’re not yet ready to apply any of this to children with language problems.

INSIDER: Does there appear to be any gender-based differences in language acquisition?

Girls have a slight edge when it comes to language.

So far, I have not addressed this issue specifically in my own research. However, it’s now generally accepted that girls have a slight edge when it comes to language and will usually learn things a few months earlier than boys.

INSIDER: How do you see the role of English (in its international form) as lingua franca changing over the next decade?

It is obvious that China will become a big power over the next fifty years, so conceivably, the role of English could change. However, the trend that I see right now is English continuing to become more and more dominant, especially in business and science. There is simply no other candidate at this point.

It’s still news to monolinguals in the U.S. that you can learn a second language without affecting your first language.

I would like to make one other comment, which I’m sure is common knowledge among your readers. It’s still news to monolinguals in the U.S. that you can learn a second, third and even fourth language without affecting your ability to speak your first language well. Of course, there’s a tremendous value in doing this, and most of the world understands this already. However, there is certainly an under-appreciation of this value in the U.S., which affects how it does business and how it looks at the rest of the world.

INSIDER: How do you see the role of English worldwide affecting languages that are in the process of disappearing?

From a linguist’s point of view, it’s much more scientifically useful to have lots of different languages if you want to generalize about what’s going on. Of course it’s also culturally valuable as well.

Speaking on a personal level, I look at the issue from two perspectives. As a parent, I want my child to speak a standard form of English, in addition to any other languages that may be present in her environment, in order to be able to compete economically. Yet, as a professional, I am ambivalent since this attitude can add pressure to lesser-known languages disappearing at even faster rates.

And then politics, of course, comes into play – the elites in the developing world are always multilingual. That’s one of the links that allows them to plug into the international network to develop economic ties outside of their home countries. Whether these ties always benefit the majority of people in their own countries is another question. I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, who was deeply involved for several years in the economies of several struggling societies, on this same topic. Perkins describes himself as a highly paid professional who helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by convincing them to borrow more money than they could possibly repay. As a result, the U.S. was then able to take control over their economies. I recommend that you read the book if you have not already done so.

INSIDER: Why did you become a linguist?

It was a happy coincidence, actually. I started out as a math and philosophy major, but took a course by George Lakoff, the well-known cognitive linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, and I became hooked. I am extremely interested in the psychology of language from various perspectives: its acquisition, processing and representation in the mind.

INSIDER: What is your favorite language blooper?

My husband is from Iran, and he tells this wonderful story about a well-known consumer products company preparing to market its laundry detergent in his home country. The marketing people wanted the name to be expressed as Snow in Farsi to denote the concept of cleanliness associated with the color white, but the transliterated version somehow mutated into English as Barf – not exactly a marketer’s dream!

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Dr. Adele Goldberg is Professor of Linguistics and Associated Faculty in Psychology at Princeton University. Her areas of specialty include language acquisition, language processing, lexical semantics and syntax. From 1997-2004, Goldberg was an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She began her career at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).