Chapter 9 - Lana's Acquisition of Language Skills

Abstract

This chapter discusses Lana's acquisition of many critical language skills. Lana progressed rapidly in her training and mastered the system more readily than had been anticipated. All of these spontaneous innovations reveal a considerable degree of abstracting and generalizing ability; Lana's performances on occasion involved transferring information learned in one situation to another and generalizing skills learned in limited contexts to deal with broader problems. The first instance of Lana's spontaneous acquisition of linguistic-type skills was the most crucial—her learning to read lexigrams. Without specific training, Lana did learn how to read the projected lexigrams, and she also grasped the importance of their serial order to the point that she could complete valid sentences begun for her or erase invalid sentence beginnings presented to her by the experimenter. Lana's novel use of stock sentences reflects in a different way her mastery of the abstract concepts that underlie language use. In response to a problem situation, she spontaneously began using stock sentences for purposes different from those she had originally been taught were appropriate, and yet her novel uses of these sentences were completely suitable to the situations at hand. Subsequently, Lana moved beyond the stock-sentence phase and began composing entirely novel and appropriate sentences on her own.