10.928, Review: MacWhinney: The Emergence of Language

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-928. Wed Jun 16 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.928, Review: MacWhinney: The Emergence of Language

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1)
Date:  Mon, 07 Jun 1999 04:38:40 -0400
From:  Dina Belyayeva <belyayev at phys.ufl.edu>
Subject:  RE: Available for Review: Historical, Lang Acquisition

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 07 Jun 1999 04:38:40 -0400
From:  Dina Belyayeva <belyayev at phys.ufl.edu>
Subject:  RE: Available for Review: Historical, Lang Acquisition

MacWhinney, B. (Ed.). (1999). The Emergence of Language. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Mahwah, NJ. 500 pages.


Reviewed by Dina Belyayeva

Synopsis:

This book is the first comprehensive collection of papers that promote an
emergentist approach to language acquisition. Emergintism is a conceptual
framework that does not explicitly reject either nativist or empiricist position
but rather takes a step further from the current plateau of the nature-nurture
debate by showing how language emerges from interactions between biological
and environmental processes. The 16 chapters of the book were initially
presented at the 28th Carnegie Mellon Symposium on Cognition, and offer
contributions from a broad range of perspectives, such a connectionist, lexicalist, cognitive, functional and social-pragmatic.

Overview and Critical Evaluation:

The book is exceptionally well written which makes some highly specialized
topics accessible to a much wider audience of linguists and psychologists
interested in language acquisition issues.

The first chapter (The Emergence of Language: A Conspiracy Theory --
Jeffrey L. Elman) offers an outline of a connectionist perspective on language
developed by Elman and his colleagues in their 1996 book RETHINKING
INNATENESS. Unlike nativism that defines innateness in terms of specific
wiring at the level of representations, emergentism redefines innateness by
offering a taxonomy of levels: representational, architectural and chronotopic
(responsible for timing). An innate behavior, therefore, is a result of interactions between processes that modify environmental input at each
of these levels. Elman uses computer simulations to demonstrate
how non-domain-specific processing constraints result in domain-specific
behavior. Although he purposefully draws all the attention to a single
level (chronotopic), more elaboration on how levels interact (particularly
Table 1.1.) is needed for readers to appreciate the proposed taxonomy.

Elizabeth Bates and Judith C. Goodman (Chapter 2 - On the Emergence of
Grammar from the Lexicon) take on the debate about domain-specificity of
language by offering a unified lexicalist approach to grammar acquisition and
processing. In this chapter they pursue two objectives: to demonstrate (1) that
grammar and lexicon are acquired by the same mental-neural mechanisms,
and (2) that these mechanisms are not unique to language. To support their
position they offer a summary of longitudinal and cross-sectional data from
normal children that reveals strong correlation between vocabulary size and
grammar development. Their reevaluation of existing experimental and
longitudinal studies dealing with  atypical populations helps to rid of some
stereotypes that were often used as evidence for grammar-specific neural
wiring in the brain.

A more moderate emergentist view on the role of the lexicon in grammar
acquisition is offered by Adele E. Goldberg (Chapter 7 -- The Emergence
of the Semantics of Argument Structure Constructions). According to this
view, argument structure acquisition is an emergent property that derives
from the processes of categorization and generalization of the meaningful
input. Within this approach a particular role is assigned to light verbs that
are characterized by more general semantics and greater accessibility in
a wider variety of contexts.

An interesting diachronic perspective on emergence of grammar is proposed
in Chapter 3 (Generativity and Variation: The Notion 'Rule of Grammar' Revisited
 -- T. Givon). As a premise for the discussion Givon offers a review of
philosophical antecedents to nativist and empiricist positions. A Cognitive-
Adaptive Perspective that he later details takes an intermediate position that
is more in line with the emergentist trend. A range of typological and
variational data  is presented to support for this middle-ground position.
 Some acronyms (pp 96-97) may be not familiar to a wider audience of readers
and need to be explained.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer processing accounts that take into consideration
statistical aspects of linguistic input.

Chapter 4 (The Emergence of Grammaticality in Connectionist Networks -
Joseph Allen & Mark S. Seidenberg) begins with a discussion of problems
created by the competence-performance distinction adopted by the generative
approach. According to this approach statistical aspects of linguistic input
 (e.g. impoverished input, negative evidence) are excluded as important factors
in language learning. To demonstrate the contrary the authors chose the
concept of grammaticality. A&S used a variant of a simple recurrent network
to demonstrate that grammaticality judgments do not necessarily require
access to principles of grammar, but may be based on statistical regularities
of linguistic input.

In Chapter 5 (Disambiguation and Grammar as Emergent Soft Constraints -
Risto Miikkulainen & Marshall R. Mayberry, III) M&M present computer
simulations to demonstrate how particular kinds of linguistics constraints
(soft constraints) emerge from statistical regularities of word co-occurrence.
Although their models successfully apply soft constraints by correlating
new input with past contexts, it's not clear whether they will be able to
resolve structural ambiguities that trigger garden-path processing.

Maryellen C. MacDonald (Chapter 6 - Distributional Information in Language Comprehension, Production, and Acquisition: Three Puzzles and a Moral)
uses analyses of verb modification ambiguity and heavy-NP shift to
demonstrate how processing constraints emerge from distributional information
that was made available to a speaker in prior comprehension and production
events. The same system of emergent constraints is proposed to govern
language acquisition. In conclusion she offers a review of studies that can
develop this branch of language acquisition research. It is surprising though
that she does not consider the Optimality Theory accounts as potential
contributors to the field.

Brian MacWhinney (Chapter 8 -The Emergence of Language from
Embodiment) presents a unified theoretical framework of language organization
and processing by using a cognitive ability of perspective-taking as a starting
point for emergence of embodied meaning. Four perspectival systems
(affordances; spatio-temporal reference frames; causal action chains; and
social roles) are used as central organizing principles that provide common
cognitive ground for many distinct language phenomena. MacWhinney outlines neurophysiological implications of the proposed hypothesis and clearly defines
its limitations.

Catherine E. Snow (Chapter 9 - Social Perspectives on the Emergence of
Language) promotes a view according to which children's linguistics abilities
emerge from interactions between children's social capacities and social-
pragmatic conditions of their immediate environment. She introduces a new
form of bootstrapping -- pragmatic precocity -- as the primary force that helps
to take the language learning process off the ground.

Chapters 10, 11, and 12 address issues of lexical acquisition and processing.
The first chapter in the group (Children's Noun Learning: How General Learning
Processes Make Specialized Learning Mechanisms - Linda B. Smith) presents
results from a series of longitudinal studies that demonstrate how general
mechanisms of associative and attentional learning create shape bias in learning
of count noun terms. The conclusion that word learning emerges from general l
eaning processes not special to language follows the "party line" of the
emergentisit program outlined by Elman. The author, however, is not sufficiently
explicit on the criteria that distinguishes between language-specific and
general learning processes. The remark that attentional learning can be
also achieved by non-linguistic perceptible cues, such as hand gestures,
inadvertently entails that signing is a non-linguistic behavior.

Chapter 11  (Emerging Cues for Early Word Learning - Roberta Michnick
Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & George Hollich) proposes the developmental
lexical framework that captures mechanisms of early word learning. The
authors adopt a hybrid emergentist position that attempts to offer a common
ground for various approached to word learning, such as the constraints-based,
social-pragmatic and domain-general. The principles that were largely borrowed
from the constraints-based literature are said to evolve from basic into more
complex as children become more sophisticated in their abilities to weight a
variety of cues. A new method (The Interactive Intermodal Preferential Looking
Paradigm) is offered to illustrate how children learn to incorporate these
principles. The method does not require cumbersome eye tracking equipment
to measure duration of infants' attentional states. Yet, it is not clear
how this paradigm can be implemented to register whether a child actually
follows experimenter's gaze. As a model, the proposed hierarchy of principles
lacks internal structure that could be used to define mechanisms responsible for
transitions between and within tiers.

William Merriman (Chapter 12 - Competition, Attention, and Young Children's
Lexical Processing) presents a model of children's lexical processing (CALLED)
that ties many loose ends existing in the literature. The model's centerpiece is
a device that uses associations between various dimensions (features, functions,
exemplars) and contextual cues (objects, scenes, events) to acquire and access
words. Words' retrieval can be affected by learned attentional responses to
words. Factors affecting attention include recency and frequency effects,
distinctiveness of features, and social, pragmatic and linguistic cues. What
makes this model particularly attractive is that its competition-attention
component can be used to construe lexical principles (e.g. Shape Bias and
Mutual Exclusivity) as emergent properties. It also offers a rule that can
predict which principles are most prominent at different points of lexical
development.

The remaining chapters address issues of phonological development.

In Chapter 13 (Statistical Learning in Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Domains -
Richard N. Aslin, Jenny R. Saffran & Elissa L. Newport) preferential listening
technique was used to demonstrate infants' sensitivity to phonotactic
regularities of artificial languages. The obvious discord between the
experimental findings suggesting that general learning mechanisms are
employed in language learning and concluding remarks that take a rather
sharp turn towards nativism creates a rather awkward impression. If the
purpose of the paper were to demonstrate that "unconstrained learning
mechanisms will not, by themselves,
correctly learn just those things that every human baby learns" , than the study
should have been designed in a way that could generate supporting evidence.

Chapter 14 (The Emergence of Phonology from the Interplay of Speech
Comprehension and Production: A Distributed Connectionist Approach -David C.
Plaut and Christopher T. Kello) and Chapter 15 (The Emergence of Faithfulness -
Joseph Paul Stemberger & Barbara Handford Bernhardt) address the issue of
phonological development from two different perspectives - connectionist and
Optimality Theory (OT). P&K present a computer stimulation of the framework
that captures computational aspects of phonological processing as the basis
or emergent phonological representations. The stimulation provides an impressive
research tool by being able to demonstrate how a model can learn from variable
input and use the extracted knowledge to gradually achieve the target production
level. S&B present their variant of OT, according to which constraints that
guide children's phonological development are not innate domain-specific
processes, but rather emergent principles sensitive to communicative and
Bilingualism are the major areas of my research interests. Other areas of
interest include semantic memory disorders and models of language production
and comprehension.



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