Developmental psychology.pdf

Cognition and Language 225
construction, "But what means bucket?" The parent replies that a bucket is a pail,
and the child has an increased vocabulary not so much through conditioning as through
understanding words, using them, and thinking about them.
The conditioning approach appears even more inadequate when the child begins
combining words and intonations in such a systematic way that they become sentences,
not random words, and permit the enormous nuances of meaning that are
characteristic of true language competence. The child often makes basically correct
grammatical constructions, including minor elements, even without previously hearing
the particular sequence of sounds, and in this sense the child is learning language rules.
At some underlying level which he or she is unable to articulate to an adult, the child
is analyzing language and how it works. Even the child's incorrect grammatical constructions,
as in teached and kitted, suggest that the speaker is following some rule
(Chomsky, 1957).
In the complex process of language acquisition, not yet well understood, both
viewpoints may be relevant. The child must have the opportunity to learn the basic
ingredients of the language, and here the environment is a necessary condition. Beyond
this aspect the child must master a well-constructed system for using these ingredients,
and again the environment is a factor. But the relatively short time within which this
implicit understanding is achieved suggests to many linguists that there is an innate
predisposition toward this aspect of language competence. In short, the conditioning
view may best explain the learning of words, sounds, and meanings, known as language
habits, and the cognitive approach may offer the best approach for understanding the
mastery of sentence construction and syntax, known as language rules.
Human Language in Animals
The other side of this question of language learning brings us full circle, back to our
starting point, for here we are concerned with animals. Chimpanzees, as we saw at the
outset of this chapter, can form concepts, but can they acquire a human language?
This question is at the center of a long black-box controversy, one that remains unsettled
even today, despite efforts to teach chimpanzees through computers, sign language,
plastic symbols, and so forth.
On the negative side, chimpanzees do not seem to understand syntax in any
significant way. Their word order is sometimes capricious and often imitative of the
trainer. And they do not successfully construct their own sentences (Seidenberg &
Petitto, 1979). Perhaps partly for this reason chimpanzees, when using human language
systems among themselves, do not take turns in the sense of normal human
conversation (Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh, & Boysen, 1980).
Another doubt arises from the presence of human investigators in teaching
and testing language competence. Whenever the animal responds successfully, unintentional
cueing may be involved. These unconscious signals are known as the Clever
Hans phenomenon, after a carefully trained turn-of-the-century horse that seemed to
use language to perform amazing intellectual feats. Eventually it was discovered that
Clever Hans did not understand language at all but was responding instead to subtle
cues unwittingly provided by his hopeful master. The Clever Hans phenomenon is a
possible influence in any attempt to train animals, as alert pet lovers well know (Sebeok
& Umiker-Sebeok, 1980; Mountjoy & Lewandowski, 1984).
On the positive side, there is some evidence of the rudiments of syntax. After
three years, 78 percent of Washoe's sign combinations were similar to the two-word
combinations of children 16 to 27 months old (Brown, 1973a). Lana progressed on the
computer from single words to word combinations and then to an appreciation of syntax
(Rumbaugh, 1977). Koko, a gorilla with more than five years of training, used
language to acquire language, much like a child of three years. And when confronted
with a mask for the first time, she made up her own word, calling it eye hat (Patterson,
1978, 1981).