Where learning begins: initial representations for language learning

Abstract

Introduction Linguists and psychologists in impressively large numbers have devoted their professional energies to the topic of language learning. This is no surprise. As Bloomfield (1933) put it, ‘Language learning is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform’ (1933: 29). Study of languages and their learning in the years that have intervened since Bloomfield's work have given no cause to diminish our sense of awe that virtually all little children all over the world successfully accomplish this feat. Recently, however, perspectives on just what is learned and how it is learned have changed considerably. In the view of the structuralist linguists (and many present-day psychologists), acquiring language is a matter of identifying from scratch a linguistic system that might be almost anything at all. Borrowing Bloomfield's words again, ‘Features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible’ (1933: 20), and hence ‘The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations’ (1933: 29). This view suggests that at bottom learning a language may be no different from other learning feats – for instance, learning to swing a tennis racquet or to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It is only the sheer size and scope of the problem that elevates language learning to the status of ‘greatest’ learning feat.

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