Summary: sensorimotor experience and language

[Jordan Zlatev]

Dear Info-childes readers,

I wish to thank everyone who replied to my querie and am quite happy that
the discussion seems to have caught on: the issues brought up are exactly
what prompted my question in the first place. Since most people have
replied directly to the net I will only summarise those references sent
directly to me.

Melissa Bowerman:
Jordan, N. (1972). Is there an Achilles' heel in Piaget's theorizing?
 Human Development, 15:325-384.

Joyce Tang Boyland:
Alison Gopnik has done some very nice work on the relation between
Piagetian tasks and language dvelopment.

Annette Karmiloff-Smith:
there is some unpublished work suggesting that children with SMA develop
language faster than those who can crawl around and explore the world. The
authors suggest that this is due to the child spending more time exploring
language because of no competition from other stimuli.  If I recall, the
data concerned morphological markers.

Robin N Campbell:
My old employer and mentor Margaret Donaldson was interested in this
question in the late 1960s, and she sought to investigate it with
'thalidomide' children, whose limbs were often rudimentary.   I'm not sure
whether anything got published, but the outcome was perfectly clear.  There
was no evidence of lag in sensorimotor achievement, apart from those
achievements directly affected by the disability.
However, I wouldn't at all go along with Monod (and even less with Chomsky)
on this hypothesis.  Piaget's ideas about the origins of sensorimotor
structures are simply not precise enough to be susceptible to this sort of
global empirical test.  Piaget's own evidence is all particularized:  he
traces the origin of particular structures (throwing a ball, say) in
previous experiences with arm movements, grasp, balls, etc.

Wendy Hough-Eyamie:
One population that has been study in reference to your question about
the importance of sensori-motor experience on the acquisition of
language is children born with cerebral palsy.  A colleague of mine
conducted her doctoral research on the topic.  I am not sure whether she
was looking from a Piagetian perspective at motor experience but I'm
sure her research is relevant to your interest.  Her name is Dr. Ann
Sutton...

Claire Kopp:
Some years ago, we published a brief report about a child born without any
limbs (Kopp & Shaperman, 1973). We were interested in the development of
sensorimotor skills, because of Piaget's emphasis on motor activity in early
cognitive development. I tested the child, starting when he was about 2 yrs.
The testing took quite a while because of the child's limitations; his
sensorimotor development was okay. His language development was also 'normal'.
I followed the child until he was 7, and his functional use of language was on
a par with other children his age. I heard he later went to college, etc.


Miguel Perez Pereira (on acquisition by blind children)
B. Landau & L Gleitman (1985). Language and experience. Evidence from the
blind. Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Harvard University Press.

Peters, A. M. (1994).  The interdependence of social, cognitive, and
linguistic development:  Evidence from a visually impaired child. In H.
Tager-Flusberg (Ed.), Constraints on language acquisition:  Studies of
atypical children.  Hillsdale, NJ:  Erlbaum.

Pérez-Pereira, M. & Castro, J. (1997). Language acquisition and the
compensation of visual deficit: New comparative data on a controversial
topic. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 439-459.

Pérez-Pereira, M. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (in press). Language development and
social interaction in blind children. London: Psychology Press.

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini:
Monod and Chomsky were right. In all these years there has been not an
example of a motor impediment that causes a speech deficit, except in the
most trivial instances (the muscles of the mouth in production, motor
handicaps in signing, again only at the production level). I think that
theirs was a brilliant insight.

Thank you again, and following Brain's discussion of the (potential) role
of cross-modal mappings and his question:

> I'm curious whether others have considered the implications of
> perspective-mapping for language acquisition.

- let me mentioned one source of evidence which has so far not surfaced:
modeling language acquisition through robotics (which is what I am
currently involved in). Hideki Kozima has considered the role of
perspective-mapping in this context:

http://www-karc.crl.go.jp/kss/xkozima/work/overview-E.html


And I will be doing likewise in my project, eventually. A question which
puzzles me in this context is: to what extent is it justified to assume
that the innate mapping mechanism innate?

Cheers,

Jordan Zlatev
Cognitive Science
Lund University
Kungshuset, Lundagård
222 22 Lund, Sweden

fax. : (+46) (0)46-222 9758
tel. : (+46) (0)46-222 0926
email: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se
http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/