Review of J. M. Mandler (Ed.), The foundations of mind

Linguistic Inquiry, 2005

Towards a theory of grammatical relations, ed. by Frans Plank, 385-404. New York: Academic Press. A recurring theme in arguments from the poverty of the stimulus concerns children's knowledge of linguistic structure. Nativists point to the extensive gap between what children know and what they could have learned from experience, even given optimistic assumptions about children's abilities to extract information from the environment, and to form generalizations. This squib looks at children's knowledge of linguistic structures that involve the semantic property of downward entailment, allowing us to address a recent critique of children's knowledge of structure offered by Lewis and Elman (2002). 1 Structure Dependence and Poverty of the Stimulus An example of structure-dependent linguistic principles deals with question formation. This phenomenon was originally described by Chomsky (1971), who questioned the extent to which the primary linguistic data could lead children to form the correct generalizations relating declarative sentences and their yes/no question counterparts (see also Chomsky 1980 and discussion in Piattelli-Palmarini 1980). We thank Amanda Gardner, Beth Rabbin, and Nadia Shihab for their help in conducting the experiments, and Norbert Hornstein, Luisa Meroni, Paul Pietroski, and Rosalind Thornton for helpful discussion. We also thank the staff, teachers, and children at the Center for Young Children at the University of Maryland at College Park, where the experiments were conducted.

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1995

Two approaches to language and personhood are reviewed, and drawing on naturalistic longitudinal data on two-year-olds' acquisition of English, comparisons are made based on referential and form-function analyses that make use of these approaches.

Perspectives on Language and Language Development

Deafness & Education International, 2002

Cognitive Development, 1999

Around four years of age, children recognize that action is less a consequence of the way the world is than the way it is represented by the actor. This understanding is characterized as a "theory of mind." This study examines the possibility of the development of a parallel theory of language; specifically, the understanding that, in opaque contexts, terms do not simply map on to the referent of the expression, but rather indicate how that object is to be represented. 120 3-to 7-year-olds were tested on their theory of mind (using false belief tasks) and sensitivity to opaque contexts. Children who passed false belief tasks performed more successfully on the opacity measure than those who did not, even when age was partialled out (r (117) ϭ .2453, p Ͻ .01). It is concluded that children come to realize that language does not refer to the world directly, but rather via one's representation of it. The results are consistent with the view that both abilities are manifestations of a more general understanding of representation, and that children's theories of mind and language follow similar developmental paths. Around the end of their first year, children begin to refer to objects by pointing to and naming them. Their terms may initially refer too broadly, commonly called overextensions, or too narrowly, called underextensions (

The relation between language and cognition in child development is one of the oldest and most debated questions, which has recently come back to the forefront of several disciplines in the social sciences. The overview below examines several universalistic vs. relativistic approaches to this question, stemming both from traditional developmental theories and from more recent proposals in psycholinguistics that are illustrated by some findings concerning space in child language. Two main questions are raised for future research. First, substantial evidence is necessary concerning the potential impact of linguistic variation on cognitive development, including evidence that can provide ways of articulating precocious capacities in the pre-linguistic period and subsequent developments across a variety of child languages. Second, relating language and cognition also requires that we take into account both structural and functional determinants of child language within a model that can explain development at different levels of linguistic organization in the face of cross-linguistic diversity.

1977

2007

Perhaps more than any other developmental achievement, word-learning stands at the very intersection of language and cognition. Early word-learning represents infants' entrance into a truly symbolic system and brings with it a means to establish reference. To succeed, infants must identify the relevant linguistic units, identify their corresponding concepts, and establish a mapping between the two. But how do infants begin to map words to concepts, and thus establish their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g., "dog" (noun), "fluffy" (adjective), "begging" (verb) refer to different aspects of the same scene (e.g, a standard poodle, seated on its hind legs and holding its front paws in the air)? We have proposed that infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad, universal expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities, and that this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned on the basis of their experience with the objects and events they encounter and the native language under acquisition. In this chapter, we examine this proposal, in light of recent evidence with infants and young children. Introduction Infants across the world's communities are exposed to vastly different experiences. Consider, for example, one infant being raised in a remote region of the Guatemalan rainforest, another growing up in the mountains of rural Switzerland, and a third being raised in Brooklyn, NY. Each infant will live in a world that is unimaginable to the other, surrounded by objects and events that are foreign to the other, and immersed in a language that the other cannot begin to understand. Yet despite these vast Early word learning 2 differences in experience, infants across the world display striking similarities in the most fundamental aspects of their conceptual and language development. Within the first year of life, each of these infants will begin to establish systematic links between words and the concepts to which they refer. On the conceptual side, they will begin to form categories of objects that capture both the similarities and differences among the objects they encounter. Most of these early object categories will be at the basic level (i.e., dog) and the more inclusive global level (i.e., animal). Infants will begin to use these early object categories as an inductive base to support inferences about new objects that they encounter. They will also begin to relate categories to one another, implicitly, on the basis of taxonomic (e.g., dogs are a kind of animal), thematic (e.g., dogs chase tennis balls), functional (e.g., dogs can pull children on sleds) and other relations. Infants' early object and event categories will provide a core of conceptual continuity from infancy through adulthood. Concurrent with these conceptual advances, infants in each community will make remarkably rapid strides in language acquisition. Even before they begin to understand the words of their native language, infants show a special interest in the sounds of language. Newborns respond to the emotional tone carried by the melody of human speech (Fernald, 1992a, b), and prefer speech sounds to other

2002

Perhaps more than any other developmental achievement, word-learning stands at the very intersection of language and cognition. Early word-learning represents infants' entrance into a truly symbolic system and brings with it a means to establish reference. To succeed, infants must identify the relevant linguistic units, identify their corresponding concepts, and establish a mapping between the two. But how do infants begin to map words to concepts, and thus establish their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g., "dog" (noun), "fluffy" (adjective), "begging" (verb) refer to different aspects of the same scene (e.g, a standard poodle, seated on its hind legs and holding its front paws in the air)? We have proposed that infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad, universal expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities, and that this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned on the basis of their experience with the objects and events they encounter and the native language under acquisition. In this chapter, we examine this proposal, in light of recent evidence with infants and young children. Introduction Infants across the world's communities are exposed to vastly different experiences. Consider, for example, one infant being raised in a remote region of the Guatemalan rainforest, another growing up in the mountains of rural Switzerland, and a third being raised in Brooklyn, NY. Each infant will live in a world that is unimaginable to the other, surrounded by objects and events that are foreign to the other, and immersed in a language that the other cannot begin to understand. Yet despite these vast Early word learning 2 differences in experience, infants across the world display striking similarities in the most fundamental aspects of their conceptual and language development. Within the first year of life, each of these infants will begin to establish systematic links between words and the concepts to which they refer. On the conceptual side, they will begin to form categories of objects that capture both the similarities and differences among the objects they encounter. Most of these early object categories will be at the basic level (i.e., dog) and the more inclusive global level (i.e., animal). Infants will begin to use these early object categories as an inductive base to support inferences about new objects that they encounter. They will also begin to relate categories to one another, implicitly, on the basis of taxonomic (e.g., dogs are a kind of animal), thematic (e.g., dogs chase tennis balls), functional (e.g., dogs can pull children on sleds) and other relations. Infants' early object and event categories will provide a core of conceptual continuity from infancy through adulthood. Concurrent with these conceptual advances, infants in each community will make remarkably rapid strides in language acquisition. Even before they begin to understand the words of their native language, infants show a special interest in the sounds of language. Newborns respond to the emotional tone carried by the melody of human speech (Fernald, 1992a, b), and prefer speech sounds to other