Beyond Cognitive Determination

Abstract

The above two very different quotations touch on one of the crucial issues within developmental psycholinguistics: is language acquisition mainly determined by cognitive, language-independent categorization or by categories inherent in the target language itself? An important type of evidence to consider in tackling this question is production and comprehension data indicative of the sequence in which particular words, ‘word senses’, or grammatical constructions are acquired by children, i.e. what is often referred to as acquisition order. In particular, this chapter addresses the issue of whether cognitive categorization, and especially cognitive asymmetry, is a sufficiently good predictor of acquisition order, i.e. if expressions corresponding to cognitively more ‘basic’ structures will ontogenetically precede expressions corresponding to more complex structures. The hypothesis that this is the case is what I will refer to as the cognitive determination hypothesis with respect to language acquisition. It is often reflected in the work of developmentalists who place a pivotal role on pre-linguistic categories, such as Cromer (1991) and Mandler (1996). Linguists working within the framework of cognitive semantics occasionally make implicit use of this hypothesis in appealing to acquisition order as evidence for the “cognitive reality” of particular analyses! Perhaps one of the most explicit expressions of the cognitive determination hypothesis is presented by H. Clark:

Since time is a spatial metaphor, the use of a term to denote time must have been preceded by the use of the comparable term to denote space. In general, therefore, spatial expressions should appear before time expressions, and in particular, each term that can be used both spatially and temporally should be acquired in its spatial sense first (1973, p. 57).

We saw a flock of sheep. There’s a sound that the baby makes when she sees furry animals. She also makes that sound when she sees her mother and me naked.—Richard Brautingan, Trout Fishing in America

The relationships that cannot be the product of the child’s isolated constructional efforts must be given to it by the community.—Rita Nolan, Cognitive Practices