Domain‐General Learning Capacities

As far as acquisition of language is concerned, it seems clear that reinforcement, casual observation, and natural inquisitiveness (coupled with a strong tendency to imitate) are important factors, as is the remarkable capacity of the child to generalize, hypothesize, and “process information” in a variety of very special and apparently highly complex ways which we cannot yet describe or begin to understand, and which may be largely innate, or may develop through some sort of learning or through maturation of the nervous system. The manner in which such factors operate and interact in language acquisition is completely unknown. It is clear that what is necessary in such a case is research, not dogmatic and perfectly arbitrary claims, based on analogies to that small part of the experimental literature in which one happens to be interested. Noam Chomsky (1959), A review of Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” Language is arguably the most complex system acquired by humans. This fact, combined with the tender age at which language is typically learned, suggests that infants must come to the task of language acquisition already possessing the machinery required to master human language. What remains unknown is the nature of this machinery. Do infants possess dedicated domain-specifi c learning mechanisms, evolved for language acquisition? Or do infants take advantage of existing learning mechanisms that are not domain-specifi c to discover the structure of human language? In this chapter, we will consider the current state of the art in disentangling these views. While some progress has been made since Chomsky’s (1959) quotation reprinted above, much still remains unknown.