Re: First language acquisition


noesy_parker wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1158202973.144919.324150@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

noesy_parker wrote:

As far as I'm concerned, an utterance is the noise that comes out of
your mouth that sounds like a word or a sequence of words. If I don't
know what it means, does it matter? (i.e. if I repeated something in
another language that I don't understand, have I not made an utterance?)

No, you have not.

I think there was an article in Nature recently which suggested that there
are structures in the apparent babbling of babies, which may be the one you
referred to. Tried to find it but gave up simply because I didn't know the
key words to search for, so I can't comment on it.

(a) Don't trust anything in *Nature* or *Science* touching on language.
Their peer review process simply does not operate in the case of
linguistics. Whoever they have refereeing such articles, they're
clearly not linguists.

(b) All I've heard about babbling is that infants start out by randomly
producing all the different sounds that can come out of their mouths,
but after not very long, their repertoire narrows to the sounds heard
in the speech around them.

In any case, if all that the paper says is that babies are born with innate
capacity for acquiring language and that some kind of grammar is hardwired
into the brain, that still doesn't support your claim that "A human cannot
learn vocabulary without grammar, or vice versa.". Your claim will be much
harder to prove I suspect (probably will involve studies of brain-damaged
babies), what evidence do you have on that?

On what?

Your first clause ("if all") can't be what the paper says, it's the
basic assumption of Chomskyan linguistics.

.

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