Grammatical categories and the nature-nurture debate

Abstract

The linguistic mainstream typically describes first-language acquistion as a process involving innate species- and domain-specific abilities. Such accounts of syntactic development conceive the primary linguistic input as too limited for language acquisition to take place. The present paper discusses word categorization skills and strategies in small children. Recent empirical evidence shows that very young English-learning children are able to extract salient phonological features of words in their language and use them for accurate word categorization. In addition to this, young children also appear to use statistical regularities from fluent speech in order to group grammatically similar words together. Of special importance to these findings are the observations made by studies analyzing categorization outside the linguistic domain and/or the human species. Crucially, these findings note that not only linguistic input is probabilistic in nature. The upshot of these studies is that the ability to deal with probabilistically sequenced elements is neither (a) domain-specific, since it also applies to other domains of human perception and cognition, nor (b) is it species-specific, since this skill has also been found in some bird species and primates like cotton-top tamarins.