Page 90 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language and Mind
and parameters of linguistic theory are offered as the constraining influences. The child has certain degrees of freedom available, in making suppositions about the constituent structure of his language, but these are limited by the potential allowed by the parameters and the settings which they specify.
How does this new version of the innateness hypothesis fare when subjected to empirical test? Hyams (1992) uses data from the CHILDES database to explore a child's setting of the null subject par- ameter for English. It is assumed that the child's orig- inal setting will be null. If the language he hears fails to have morphological paradigms of the Italian type, and has a high proportion of expressed subjects, this will trigger the resetting of the parameter to non-null. Hyams finds a rapid increase in the realization of subjects (from 10to 70%) in a five-month period from 2 years 7 months to 3 years, and interprets this as the child realizing that English is not a null subject language. Not surprisingly the opening up of the innateness hypothesis to empirical test has led to attempts to provide alternative explanations of lan- guage development. Bloom (1990), for example, pre- sents data to buttress his view that children acquiring English represent the correct grammars from the start, on the basis of input data, but omit subjects because
of performance factors.
3. Conclusion
The exploration of the alternative models for language learning afforded by linguistic theory and con- nectionism will be central to research. Important information for both frameworks will be provided by cross-linguistic studies. A major program of research on the acquisition of languages other than English has been coordinated by Dan Slobin at the University of California, Berkeley for over 20 years (see Slobin 1985; 1992). Some of these languages, e.g., Hungarian, K'iche' Mayan (Guatemala), Walpiri (Australia), Western Samoan, are typologically very different from English (and each other). They provide new testing grounds for hypotheses concerning language acqui- sition. They may also, in turn, cause researchers to look afresh at the acquisition of English.
See also: Language Acquisition: Categorization and Early Concepts.
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The idea that there is a language of thought (LOT) amounts to this: having a thought with a particular content is a matter of being related in a certain way
to a sentence in an innately given mental language. The sentences or formulas in this language (mentalese) are like the sentences of public natural languages
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Language of Thought R. Carston