On the Ontogenetic Requirements for Early Language Acquisition

Abstract

A key challenge in the study of early language ontogeny is to discover when and how human language acquisition begins. Here, I attempt to move beyond dichotomous nature-nurture explanations of this process in my pursuit of the mechanisms underlying early language ontogeny. I do this by examining early language acquisition from a different perspective: I compare and contrast spoken and signed language acquisition. Then, based on the four sets of findings summarized below, I formulate a testable theory about the mechanisms that underlie early language acquisition, as well as the specific features of the environmental input, that together make possible human language acquisition. I further propose a new way to construe language ontogeny. Specifically, I advance the hypothesis that speech, per se, is not critical to language acquisition. Instead, I propose that the specific distributional patterns, or structures, encoded in the input — not the specific modality — are the critical input features necessary to enable very early acquisition to begin and to be maintained in our species from birth. A discussion relating the present findings to hypotheses about language phylogeny is also provided.