CAREER: The Relationship Between Comprehension and Production in Language Development

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Why do languages come so easily to young children? Why do adults struggle to master a new tongue, and often never achieve the same level of mastery as a seven-year old native speaker? Answers to these questions have tended to polarize the research community. On the one side, the acquisition of language is seen as a matter of learning and the opportunity to learn. From this viewpoint, adults struggle with a second language because they have already formed a "habit" of speaking their first language. As the old saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. On the other side, the acquisition of language is like the coming-in of teeth or any other maturational process. It is something that the human brain and body are built to do, and as the "language organ" develops, it latches on to whatever language or languages are in the child's environment. From this viewpoint, teaching adults a second language is like asking them to grow new teeth. Not possible, of course, so adults do the best they can with the teeth already in place. These two sides of language acquisition represent the classic debate between nature and nurture, a debate that remains far from settled. With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Ramscar brings a new approach to the debate as it is currently being played out in the arena of language acquisition. Dr. Ramscar will investigate how a very simple, imitative learning model can capture the patterns with which children acquire aspects of language like tense and plurality. This very simple model can then be slowly augmented with control mechanisms that monitor and guide its own learning, which reflect the development of similar circuits that guide this kind of thinking throughout childhood. Using this approach, Dr. Ramscar aims to simulate the way that acquiring these more strategic learning abilities comes to hinder many adults when they try to learn language at a later age. This project will provide a number of opportunities for students to step right up to the frontier of language research and play a meaningful role in its advancement. And advancing what we know about language acquisition may have broad implications for the way that languages are taught, to pre-schoolers and adults alike.