The important role played by domain-general mechanisms in an emerging view of language acquisition

Emerging evidence has revealed that Infants’ learning strategies which are unexpected and unpredicted by historical views can now shed light on new perspectives on the role played by domain-general mechanisms in language acquisition. The present essay will first attempt to offer a brief overview of the historical theoretical positions and then to discuss the new view of language acquisition.

In the second half of the 20^th century, the behavioral psychologist B F. Skinner proposed a reinforcement learning theory in his book Verbal Behavior (1957), arguing that language is an ‘operant’ behavior that can be learned through the manipulation of reward contingencies. Noam Chomsky’s review of Verbal Behavior (1959) argued against B F. Skinner on the topic of language acquisition. On Chomsky’s view, the reinforcement learning had little to do with acquiring language. Instead, what is special about human brains is the “language organ” or “language faculty” that is specifically dedicated to complete attainment of language. Chomsky posited an innate “language acquisition device” or “universal grammar” in later terms which then put forth a theory of language-specific innateness in language acquisition research.

What these historical theoretical positions suggest is the acute difference in positions on the three critical components of a theory of language acquisition. The three critical components of a theory of language acquisition include, according to Kuhl’s article, “A new view of language acquisition” in 2000, “(i) The initial state of knowledge, (ii) The mechanisms responsible for developmental change, and (iii) the role played by ambient language input.” Kuhl’s article comments on Skinner’s view and Chomsky’s view in relation to these three components. The article suggests that Skinner’s view believes “no innate information was necessary, developmental change was brought about through reward contingencies, and language input did not cause language to emerge.” On the other hand, in regard to Chomsky’s view, the article affirms that the innate knowledge of language was “a core tenet,” “development constituted ‘growth’ or maturation of the language module, and language input triggered a particular pattern from among those innately provided.”

Now that we have built our knowledge for historical theoretical views on language acquisition to a certain degree, let us draw our attention to the issues involved in researching a new view of language acquisition. What insights and new perspectives could the new data offer us? Kuhl’s article (2000) believes that the past research in the last half of the 20^th century has failed to predict the important role played by infants’ learning strategies such as pattern perception and statistical computational skills in acquiring language. “Infants’ perception of the phonetic units of speech, which requires tracking the formant frequencies, and their detection of words from cues in running speech support a different view,” stated in the article. A number of the domain-general processing mechanisms were discussed in the article to consider the emerging perspectives on language acquisition. General auditory perceptual processing mechanism for example, as the article clearly suggested, plays a significant role in infants’ parsing of the phonetic units. It is believed that infants’ initial categorical perception and partitioning of the phonetic units of language are greatly influenced by domain-general mechanisms. The new view of language acquisition proposed in Kuhl’s article tends to put a great deal of focus on the domain-general processing mechanisms and believe that those can strongly influence the outcome of language acquisition, deliberately put less weight on the  initial state of knowledge.

In the end, the interesting new view of language acquisition raised in Kuhl’s article certainly deserves experts and researchers attention to better unfold the mysterious process behind the language learning scene. Several research questions could be further discussed: If Infants can employ domain-general mechanisms to acquire first language successfully, would it be possible to reactivate the same processing mechanisms used in infants’ first language learning when learning a second language? If the answer is positive, then to what extent could this reactivation of domain-general mechanisms be effective in second language acquisition?