Johns Hopkins University – Homewood Campus – (410-516-5250/office phone)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
2:00 p.m.
Department
of Psychology
New York University
“What is the Language Faculty Made Of?
Evidence from Human Infants and Molecular Biology”
To what extent is the machinery for acquiring language special to language? Discussion has typically teetered between two extreme views, the notion that language is an autonomous specialized module, and the view that language is just a special application of sophisticated cognitive processes. In this talk, I argue against both of these views and in favor of a new perspective, dubbed the "Orchestrated Components" view. According to the Orchestrated Components view, language is to be understood as a coordinated product of a diverse set of mechanisms, some evolutionarily ancient, some evolutionarily more recent. The first part of the talk motivates this view, drawing on recent literature in genetics and developmental neuroscience. In the second part, I present results from empirical investigations of the learning capacities of human infants, suggesting that some learning mechanisms are domain-general, while others are (at least initially) domain-specific. Taken together, these empirical and theoretical considerations argue for an approach to linguistics that makes closer contact with cognition, yet does not abandon the notion that the capacity for language arises from a human-specific endowment.
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