Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition

Language acquisition can be viewed in terms of two basic components acquisition of a set of categories and development of processes to operate on these categories. This two-component view of language runs throughout this collection of papers, but tlie focus of attention throughout is m,ostly on the categories, rather than the processes. This shared focus on category acquisition arises from the fact that the contributors spent a year working together closely on the ideas underlying the analysis. The resulting volume provides a focus on the basic issue of tlie development of grammatical categorization that is unmatched in the language acquisition literature. The volume begins with an introduction by Braine and concludes with a commentary by Levy and Schlesinger. Between these two commentaries, we find eight papers dealing with different approaches to tlie categorization issue. There are no weak papers in the collection. However, tlie sixth chapter by Sclilesinger and tlie eighth chapter by Braine stand out as particularly strong. In my opinion, every researcher with any interest in language learning must read these two chapters. Schlesinger’s chapter, entitled “Tlie origin of relational categories”, presents a fundamental re-examination of tlie status of the “semantic” approach to language acquisition. This is tlie approach that was utilized.throughout the 1970s in the work of researchers such as Bates, Bloom, Bowerman, hlaclvhinney, Schlesinger, and Slobin. The semantic approach is most easily contrasted with the “syntactic” approach. The latter holds that syntax is acquired directly without the aid of semantic relations or other general cognitive cues. Tlie semantic approach, on tlie other hand, claims that the child’s learning of syntax and morphology is based upon tlie manipulation of an underlying set of semantic relations that explicate the f o r m of grammar. Early formulations of the semantic hypothesis imagined a very simple universal set of primitives, but later formulations, found in Bates and h!ac\Vhinney (1982) or Sclilesinger (1982) presented a richer, niore realistic picture. In this new chapter, Schlesinger significantly updates his position, taking into account the various criticisms that have been directed against earlier versions. There are three crucial aspects of the new formulation that allow Sclilesinger t o respond successfully to earlier criticisms. First, he has moved his focus of attention to the process of “semantic” assimilation which uses linguistic structure to reshape the contents of cognition. This abductive extraction of formal categories on the basis of real semantic primitives was already present in Schlesinger (1982), but in this chapter