Okay. Children are aware of what sentences are grammatical and agrammatical from a very early age, as young as 3 in some cases. Yet, roughly 95% of the sentences they hear are agrammatical or incomplete. The majority of the utterances they are exposed to will remain incomplete from a grammatical point of view all their lives. Yet, they know what kinds of sentences are right and which are wrong. [Most of this is cribbed from what I remember of Pinker's PhD thesis.]
On the basis of this data, it is difficult to see how a purely behaviourist, data-driven account of language is adequate to explain language acquistion.
Comparitive studies of children acquiring a first lanaguge and adults and children acquiring a second one point out that the type of errors made by adults trying to acquire a language in a rule-driven fashion are very different from the types of errors acquired by children learning a first language or young children acquiring a second. [This is what I remember from Guy Lefrancois's work in modeling language acquisition in the 70's.]
Furthermore, the sharp difference in language acquisition ability before and after puberty (as little as 6 months makes a huge difference in ability) is strong evidence for a biological mechanism in language acquisition. Regardless of learning environment, reinforcement or stimulus, all but a small minority of adults will never master a second language. The magnitude of difference between the language acquisition ability of children and adults is unparalleled by differences in the ability to acquire other skills. [This undermines Geoffrey Sampson's argument that children acquire all skills more quickly than adults.]
Now, Chomsky requires a universal grammar in order to explain this. I suspect a more universal semantic system is far more likely, and some universal limitations on how meaning is restructured into linear utterances.
However, children acquire language because they are programmed to do so. The consistency in language acquistion among children, regardless of their environment; the rigidity of age barriers to language acquistion; the acquistion of language even by children who can neither hear nor speak; the existence of language among **all** humans raised in contact with as little as one other person, even when that other person is also an infant with no language; the inability of children raised in isolation from all contact (like that poor girl in Ohio who was raised in a closet) to learn language at the same level later in life - all these things point straight to biology as the motive for language acquistion.
Scott Martens
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