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Karena, an Inuit girl adopted by my former neighbors in the Gatineau, speaks English. Skinner could explain why she speaks English rather than Inuktatuk. She is growing up in a community in which she can imitate English sounds and sentences and is reinforced for creating English sounds and sentences. Such a language community is a necessary condition for the acquisition of a language, but is not a sufficient condition. The same neighbors also "adopted" a husky. Pattak spent his first few years in an Inuktatuk-language community and his later years in an English-language community, but Pattak (who could be bilingual now, were he a Skinnerian dog) has learned neither Inuktatuk nor English. Karena - but, not poor Pattak - was born with the potential to speak a language, any language, and that potential could be realized by spending her early years in any language community. Chomsky's innate capacity theory [CHOMSKY 1966] states that Karena could learn English because she belongs to a species which has a language-acquisition device (LAD) built into its nervous system, whereas Pattak could learn neither Inuktatuk nor English because he belongs to a species which, alas, lacks a LAD. Karena was prewired to learn a language - not Inuktatuk or English or any particular language but whatever language was used in her environment. Language is, therefore, primarily an inside-out process based on the unfolding of the genetic potential. The outside-in influence of the linguistic environment serves the necessary, but secondary, function of providing "fuel" to keep the language-generating genetic machinery working. Jerome Bruner calls this the language-acquisition support system (LASS) [BRUNER]. Every LAD needs a LASS. Konrad Lorenz demonstrated that nature leaves a gap in the development of the goose to be filled in by the environment by arranging that the first large moving object the gosling saw on emerging from the egg was not mother goose but Lorenz [LORENZ]. Those goslings followed Lorenz rather than mother goose, the source of satisfiers of survival needs, as nature intended. Language acquisition could be considered as such imprinting on a larger scale. Nature leaves a large gap in the development of the human to be filled in by the language community. The interactionists view the person as dealing not only with input information, as in the behavioristic concept, or not only with input and stored information, as in the humanistic concept, but with input and stored and fedback information. S/he is actively exploring and manipulating the environment in order to know and understand it. The exploration is guided by fedback information from the environment as a result of his/her actions. |
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