Specific Language Impairment

Running head: THE GENERATIVIST/INTERACTIONIST DEBATE OVER SLI
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over Specific Language Impairment: Psycholinguistics at a Crossroads
Stuart Shanker Departments of Psychology and Philosophy Atkinson College, York University North York, Ontario M3J 1P3 -1-
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Canada
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Abstract
There are certain defining problems in psychology that force us to clarify both the origins and the limits of a paradigm that has long governed our thinking in a particular area of research. The current debate over the nature and causes of Specific Language Impairment is proving to be just such an issue. In particular, the existence of the KE family, 15 of whose 37 members suffer from Specific Language Impairment, has raised far-reaching questions about the conceptual foundations of our current views about language deficits, and indeed, about language development in general.
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over Specific Language Impairment: Psycholinguistics at a Crossroads
There are certain defining problems in psychology that force us to clarify both the origins and the limits of a paradigm that has long governed our thinking in a particular area of research. The current debate over the nature and causes of Specific Language Impairment is proving to be just such an issue. In particular, the existence of the KE family, 15 of whose 37 members suffer from Specific Language Impairment, has raised far-reaching questions about the conceptual foundations of our current views about language deficits, and indeed, about language development in general.
The Epigenesis of Generative Grammar
The meteoric rise of generativism in the 1960s is deeply puzzling. One would have thought that, in the pervasively behaviorist climate that existed at the time, Noam Chomskys early writings would have met with at least some resistance, if not outright hostility. Yet Chomskys boisterous attacks on behaviorism, not to mention his open disdain for empirical research, were greeted by psycholinguists with widespread enthusiasm: so much so that a paradigm shift is commonly said to have occurred in the field overnight. Clearly something about the conceptual environment of the time must account
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI for this apparent anomaly. If we can clarify what it was about Chomskys ideas that so appealed to behaviorist sentiments, perhaps we can deepen our understanding, not just of the reasons why generativism enjoyed such an immediate success but also, its future prospects. For not only is the nature of a theory inextricably tied to the environment in which it is nurtured, but so too are its continuing fortunes. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that Chomsky tapped into the computational Weltanschauung that was sweeping through and transforming psychology. Even though he was careful to distance himself from the strong version of the Mechanist Thesis that was popular at MIT at the time, Chomsky certainly capitalized on computational ideas in his initial attacks on behaviorism: especially when he argued that in principle it may be possible to study the problem of determining what the built-in structure of an information-processing (hypothesis-forming) system must be to enable it to arrive at the grammar of a language from the available date in the available time (Chomsky 1957: 58). This so-called steady state argument cast the behaviorist in the role of a neophyte programmer who was struggling to model one of the most complex of all human behaviors using a relatively crude Markov chain technique. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the new breed of computationalists, all of whom were familiar with Shannons proof that a brute force approach could not be employed to construct even the most basic of chess programs (Shannon 1949), should so readily have accepted the idea that the brain must be equipped with certain super-rules which enable a child to acquire the myriad surface rules of the natural language to which she is exposed at birth.
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Several illuminating histories have been published on the conceptual environment in which generativism was born,11 all stressing the speed with which computationalism came to dominate the cognitive sciences. On this reading, not only did the rapid ascendancy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a significant role in psychologists response to generativism, but some have suggested that Chomskys review of Verbal Behavior should be seen as one of the primary factors in the birth of cognitive science itself (Gardner 1985). Still, this does not explain how a nativist theory like generativism could have had the impact that it did on a generation of psychologists whose training had stressed the influence of the environment on development above all other factors. Moreover, AI-scientists were markedly silent on developmental matters, and generativists seemed to share AIs disinterest in psychological methodology. Indeed, to some extent, the poverty of the stimulus could be used as a stick to quell developmental concerns (and in the early 1960s was frequently so used). But most puzzling of all is how a generation of behaviorists could so readily have embraced the ideas of someone who was boldly espousing the virtues of Cartesianism (see Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker & Taylor, 1998). That is, these hard-nosed empiricists were being asked to accept the very principles of 17th-century rationalism that supposedly had been forever vanquished. Or were they? Significantly, what opposition there was to Chomskys nativism came primarily from philosophers, not psychologists (see Goodman, 1969; Quine, 1969; Putnam, 1979). But
Campbell 1982; Gardner 1985; Hodges 1983; McCorduck 1979; Nelson 1982; Newmeyer 1996; Thomas 1978.
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI then, the former were primarily concerned with the wedge Chomsky sought to drive between language and communication. As far as behaviorists were concerned, Chomskys nativism simply marked the transition from one sort of determinism to another. For all Chomsky was saying, as he later spelled out in Rules and Representations, was that Knowledge of grammar, hence of language, develops in the child through the interplay of genetically determined principles and a course of experience. Informally, we speak of this process as language learning. It makes sense to ask whether we misdescribe the process when we call it learning. ... I would like to suggest that in certain fundamental respects we do not really learn language; rather, grammar grows in the mind (Chomsky, 1980, p. 134). Three key events in the 1950s paved the way for this genetic determinist argument. First was the publication in 1952 of Lorenz King Solomons Ring. This book introduced psychologists to the view that animal behaviour patterns can be treated like anatomical traits, thereby paving the way for Chomskys assumption that a complex human behaviour like language could be genetically determined. Second was the informationtheoretic gloss that Watson and Crick imposed on genetic theory when they identified DNA as the bearer of genetic information (Watson & Crick, 1953)2; this development paved the way for the generativist view that the linguists task is to identify information which must be available independently of experience, in order for a grammar to emerge in a child (Lightfoot 1999: 52). And third was the publication, in the same year that Syntactic Structures appeared (Chomsky 1957), of Waddingtons The Strategy of the
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Genes (1957). Waddingtons notion of canalization -- the idea that species-typical anatomical or physiological traits are strongly buffered from environmental perturbations by an organisms genes -- meshed perfectly with Chomskys conception of language as the species-typical trait which distinguishes man from all other primates (see Chomsky, 1966); which accounts for the extraordinary march of human civilization over the past 30,000 years (see Bickerton 1995; Chomsky 1998); and which emerges in virtually all children at virtually the same time, regardless of the most widely varying environments (see Lenneberg 1967). Thus, as far as contemporary behaviourists were concerned, what Chomsky meant by knowledge of language was virtually the same thing as what geneticists understood by canalization (infra). And, as Pinker (1994) has shown, what Chomsky understood by rule-following was essentially the same thing as what ethologists understood by instinctive behavior. It is hard to see, then, in what sense Chomskys Cartesianism is Cartesian. For Chomsky was certainly not about to suggest that a subject enjoys privileged access to her innate knowledge; rather, the innate knowledge that Chomsky was talking about belongs to the realm of the pre-conscious which cognitivists were busy mapping out.3 In fact, the only things Chomsky had in common with Descartes were:
Although this use of the information metaphor pre-dated Watson and Crick; see Schroedinger, 1944; Keller, 1995. 3 What is latent in the mind in this sense may often require appropriate external stimulation before it becomes active, and many of the innate principles that determine the nature of thought and experience may well be applied quite unconsciously. ... That the principles of language ... are known unconsciously and that they are in large measure a precondition for language acquisition rather than a matter of institution or training is the general presupposition of Cartesian linguistics (Chomsky 1966: 63).
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI 1. A telementational conception of language, although in Chomskys case it is really two Turing Machines communicating together (see Pinker, 1994) 2. A discontinuity argument, although in Chomskys case this is just a corollary of the genetic determinism (see Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1998) 3. The principle of creativity, although Chomskys generative view of creativity -like the view which one finds in Newell and Simons (1979) analysis of creativity -- is fundamentally different from what Descartes had in mind4 4. A conception of the body as a pre-designed, self-modifying system; although Chomskys view of system encompasses higher-order capacities (such as language and intelligence) which Descartes would have assigned to the mind.5 In other words, all of the Cartesian themes that Chomsky developed in his early writings were present in the neo-behaviorist6 writings of the early 1960s. Thus, from a behaviorist perspective, what Chomskys Cartesian Linguistics was really all about was the convergence of the two primary advances in mechanist theory that were transforming behaviorist thought in the 1950s: viz, AI and Genetic Determinism. From AI, Chomsky took the idea that the brain of the child must be preequipped with a basic language program in order to arrive at a grammar of a natural language from the limited (and degenerate) data that is presented to a child. And from Genetic Determinism he took the idea that a gene or genes contain the blueprint for the
4
5
Descartes idea would be closer to what one finds in Gdel (see Shanker, 1998). Cf. Chomskys remark in Rules and Representations: My own suspicion is that a central part of what we call learning is actually better understood as the growth of cognitive structures along an internally directed course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of the environment (Chomsky, 1980, p. 33).
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI construction of this Language Acquisition Device. By marrying these themes, Chomskys argument played a crucial role in the transition from pre-computational mechanism, which eschewed all talk of the mind, to the post-computational view that higher mental processes and complex abilities, as well as reflexes and conditioned behaviours, could be explained in mechanist terms. The essence of Chomskys contribution to this transition from classical behaviorism to cognitive science was his idea that language acquisition is a maturational process, as this had been defined by Gesell: viz, one in which a childs development is directed by internal factors (genes) and which always unfolds in a fixed sequence (Gesell, 1933). Hence we find the constant refrain in Chomskys and subsequent generativist writings that a child acquires language in a fixed sequence that is under genetic control.7 On this maturational view of language acquisition, gene-environment interaction amounts to a form of potentiation: language acquisition is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions. The form of the language that is acquired is largely determined by internal factors (Chomsky, 1966, p. 65). That is, the child must be exposed to the right kind of environment (whatever that is) in order to allow for all of the information which is stored in the language gene(s) to be activated (or, as Chomsky would later put it, for the parameters of any particular natural language to be set). Herein lies the reason why generativism so swiftly assimilated
As founders of AI referred to themselves; see Miller, Galanter & Pribram, 1960; Shanker, 1998. The standard metaphor for language acquisition in generativist writings is that a child acquires language like clockwork. One of the most striking expressions of this picture can be seen on the cover of Vivian Cooks Inside Language (1997), which shows the title of the book inset against a picture of gears and sprockets.
6 7
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI the idea that The functioning of the language capacity is ... optimal at a certain critical period of intellectual development (Ibid). For on the mechanistic view of determinism that generativism embraced, it seemed straightforward to assume that the linguistic information that is encoded in the genes can only be released at specific junctures in the maturational process, the timing of which is itself directed by the genes. This picture of language development as a mechanical, maturational process has come under heavy fire in recent years from interactionists who have insisted that Language is learned not because it is a private symbol system, but because it is a means of communicating with others. Language is embedded in a social context, from the earliest rudiments of language learning to subsequent adult use (Goldstein & Hockenberger, 1991, p. 402). What we see here is a clash between two vastly different conceptions of the emergence of complex behaviors: a debate over the role that other aspects of development -- such as socioaffective, cognitive and communicative development -- play in language development. But what is ultimately at issue is the very heart of the generativist thesis: the claim that there must be a language gene that gets passed down from one generation to the next, which contains a blueprint for constructing a neural language module that processes linguistic data along the lines spelled out in generativist theory. For the implications of this hypothesis concern far more than future research agendas; at stake here is our very conception of the best methods to develop in speech language therapy and the reasons for their success.
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI The current battle-ground for this debate over whether there is a linguistic genotype (Lightfoot 1999: 52) is an extended family in London, the KE family, 15 of whose 37 members suffer from SLI (see Gopnik, 1990). To be sure, SLI is an amorphous syndrome (see 2); but the affected members of the KE family display a fairly precise type of impairment: viz, they are unable to acquire certain aspects of inflectional morphology, thus earning them the soubriquet of suffering from Grammatical SLI (van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1996). Perhaps most dramatic of all, geneticists working at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics reported in 1998 that they had succeeded in isolating a mutated region of chromosome 7 in the affected members of the KE family, which they labelled SPCH1 (Fisher, Vargha-Khadem, Watkins, Monaco & Pembrey, 1998). This is an arresting development in the language gene debate. But it is important to bear in mind that Fisher et al. (1998) are not claiming that SPCH1 codes directly for language; what they are suggesting is that a mutation in SPCH1 can result in functional abnormalities in motor-related areas of the frontal lobe, which in turn cause abnormal anatomical development of several brain areas which contribute to a situation in which the childs ability to attend to or to process certain morphosyntactic aspects of language is impaired (Fisher et al., 1998, p. 170). It is difficult to estimate just how much information is missing in this highly schematic argument; but a moments reflection suggests that, at the very least, such a developmental disorder could only occur through an extremely complex interactional process. Hence the problem that this discovery raises is: how many
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI other factors might be involved in the KE familys language deficits, besides the mutation in SPCH1? Herein lies precisely the reason why SLI has become such a pivotal issue in the debate over the generativists view of language acquisition. For what is a generativist to say of the approximately 7% of all apparently normal children who, by the age of 5, have not yet acquired language? And further, what of the fact that anywhere from 20% - 50% of these children diagnosed with SLI recover fully as a result of intensive language therapy: Does this not contravene the language gene hypothesis? Do children with SLI lie at the far left of a bell-shaped curve of a language-phenotype? Or do children with SLI confirm the anachronism of a genetic determinist view which construes language development as a maturational process? Clearly, SLI poses more than just a challenge to the generativist program; perhaps crucible would be closer to the mark. For ultimately the question raised by the generativist-interactionist debate over SLI is whether we are witnessing the impact of the new conceptual environment which has emerged in embryology: one that is vastly different from the determinist environment which nurtured and sustained generativism.
The Language Gene Argument

I not goin school today, Mommy. I sick. We goin a doctor? Why you take me to doctor Mommy? Him give me shot? Maybe yesterday I jump around too much. Tommy falled off and he have two cut now. I won jump anymore -- Pete, age 6 (Hamaguchi, 1995, p. 115).
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It may be difficult to conceive of a child like Pete setting off a major incident in international scientific waters, but stranger things have happened in the never-ending disputes over nature versus nurture. For the psycholinguistic community is deeply divided over the proper interpretation of the nature of the language deficit which Pete displays. The generativist claims that Petes impairment can best be explained as the result of a processing malfunction in his Language Acquisition Device which can be traced back to a genetic mutation (Pinker 1994). The interactionist counters that any genetic factors involved in Petes speech deficits must be seen as part of a complex developmental matrix (Bishop 199?). Both sides are agreed, however, that how we explain Petes language impairment has major implications for our views of language development in general, and not just for our understanding of the aetiology of Specific Language Impairment (SLI). SLI is currently defined as a condition in which children have a significant language deficit but no hearing impairment, no neurological damage, and no deficit in nonverbal intelligence. The diagnostic criteria for SLI are:

language test scores of -1.25 SDs or lower a performance IQ of 85 or higher no evidence of hearing problems no recent episodes of otitis media with effusion no evidence of seizure disorders, cerebral palsy, or brain lesions
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no orofacial structural problems no evidence of speech apraxia, and no symptoms of social deficits
In the paradigmatic case, the only thing abnormal about a child suffering from SLI is the fact that he scores significantly below his age mates on language tests yet scores in the normal range on IQ tests.8 But paradigmatic cases are rarely -- if ever -- encountered. Typically, a child presenting a significant language impairment will also exhibit some cognitive, affective, communicational, and/or motor problem. Indeed, Leonard refers to SLI as merely a terminological way station for groups of children until such time as finer diagnostic categories can be identified (Leonard 1998: 23). For the time being we really have no reliable measure of true cases of SLI; rather, one must simply accept, almost as a matter of trust, that there is some core population of children -- considerably below the figure of 7% -- which satisfies the strict diagnostic criteria of SLI. There are several different areas where children diagnosed with SLI may have significant difficulties with language. By no means do all children diagnosed with SLI have all of these problems; nor can any of the items on the following list be identified as core problems for the child with SLI. But generally speaking, a child with SLI will exhibit some of the following symptoms:

they may, but need not, display below age-level phonological abilities their comprehension scores are generally above production scores, but can still lag age-levels
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they may be late in acquiring first words they often have a limited vocabulary school-age children with SLI generally learn object names almost as well as agemates, but have pronounced problems with verb learning, possibly because the meaning of many verbs cannot be learned on the basis of simple exposure to an event but rather, has to be learned in the context of a sentence in which the verb appears
they often exhibit word-finding problems (e.g., long pauses in speech, frequent circumlocution and/or frequent use of nonspecific words)
their speech may be characterized by the omission of morphological suffixes and function words (grammatical morphemes)
they are often reluctant to initiate verbal interactions, and their communicative attempts are readily abandoned if they are not understood at first attempt.
How, one wonders, will the generativist deal with the apparent anomaly posed by the relatively large number of children suffering from SLI for his biological picture of universal language maturation? The answer is that, as far as the generativist is concerned, there could be no more compelling vindication of the modularity thesis than a small minority of cases in which language is selectively impaired (Pinker 1994). That is, cases in which children who have no cognitive impairment, no hearing impairment, and perhaps most important of all, no significant communication impairment, nonetheless have a language deficit. The generativist will insist that, if we look carefully at the epigram to this
He is the apposite pronoun here, because SLI is more likely to be found in males than females; and
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI section, we can see that, despite his striking speech problems, Petes pragmatic skills are fairly well developed. He has no trouble asking questions, making assertions, and even excuses. Moreover, underlying his apparently innocuous description of the previous days events, we can see Pete endeavoring to avoid being given another shot. Thus he seeks to reassure his mother that he is only feeling under the weather because he was too rambunctious the previous day and he promises her that he will not repeat this behavior. Presumably Tommy, who is also paying for this misconduct with his two cut, will not be forced by his mother to see the doctor. In other words, as far as the generativist is concerned, there is nothing wrong with Petes communicative skills; it is only his mastery of syntax that is defective. To be sure, it would seem, from the fragment presented in the above epigram, that although he cannot speak very well, Pete has nonetheless acquired a significant number of linguistic skills. For example, he speaks in sentences that conform to an SVO order; he uses pronouns, proper names, adjectives, and even modal operators; his vocabulary seems fairly well developed for a child his age; and he clearly understands the basic principles of verb tense. Yet there are also some striking patterns in his errors; for example, he appears to have trouble with contractions and infinitives; and his use of pronouns and verb forms is far from consistent. On this basis the generativist concludes that Pete shows us how there must be some pattern of genetically guided events in the development in the brain ... that is specialized for the wiring in of linguistic computation (Pinker 1994: 324). That is, rather than simply viewing SLI as an extreme condition in the range of variability that
children with SLI are more likely to have parents and siblings with a history of language problems.
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI characterizes childrens language development (see Fenson et al., 1994), or seeing SLI as a predictable consequence of the differing complexity of various linguistic constructions (see Leonard, 1987; Dale & Cole, 1991), the generativist regards the child who, e.g., persistently overgeneralizes -ed endings for irregular verbs, or who commonly omits grammatical morphemes when he speaks, in the same way as one might view a computer program like ELIZA: each may give the false appearance of possessing normal linguistic skills, but closer inspection will reveal that their productive abilities are largely the result of very different kinds of processing strategies.
The KE Family
According to contemporary generativists, the long sought-for proof of the legitimacy of Chomskys nativist claims has been found in the KE family, which has evidenced a disturbingly high incidence of Grammatical SLI. All of the members of this family have, presumably, been presented with the same linguistic experience; yet almost half of them have exhibited the symptoms of Grammatical SLI. Gopnik et al. (1997) conclude that this familial trait must be the result of a genetic defect that impairs the childrens ability to acquire abstract morphosyntactic rules. That is, the affected members of this family are said to be unable, because of a genetic mutation, to construct a normal grammar of their language. As Gopnik et al. are fully aware, this last statement bears considerable
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI theoretical weight; for the very notion of constructing a grammar presupposes a generativist picture of language acquisition. Thus Gopnik et al. explain how: In order to study the significance of [SLI], it is crucial that we provide a detailed and linguistically principled account of the impaired subjects language, so that any hypothesis about the cause of the disorder can be tested against the empirical evidence of the ways in which their language is affected. In order to do this, some fundamental assumptions about language must guide the characterization of language impairment. These principles are not specific to any particular theory of grammar, but rather are general principles about the nature of language itself (Gopnik et al., 1997, p. 114). Accordingly, Gopnik et al.s (1997) interpretation of the affected members of the KE family proceeds from the premise that: speakers of a language have an internalized set of abstract rules guiding their utterances. Uttered surface forms provide evidence about the properties of the abstract rules, but do not in themselves constitute language. It is the grammar, the set of abstract rules producing the utterances, that constitutes language, and therefore it is this grammar that must be characterized if we want to understand any language, even impaired language (Ibid., p.114)
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Thus, like other generativist attempts to subsume various linguistic disorders under a generativist umbrella (e.g., Williams Syndrome, autism, aphasias), Gopnik approaches SLI as a way of validating Principles & Parameters theory (see Pinker, 1994). On this outlook, the very manner in which we describe an SLI subjects deficits should be determined by our picture of language rather than the other way around. That is, the generativist picture of language leads one to highlight certain aspects of the childs language deficits while downplaying or ignoring what, on this view, are to be considered extraneous or conflicting data. Thus, a child who has trouble using inflectional endings is to be described as having Grammatical SLI even though that child may respond appropriately to the use of inflectional endings in everyday discourse. Moreover, the theory ignores the fact that such a childs production difficulties may fluctuate wildly, depending on such factors as how he is feeling, who is talking to, what he is talking about, or the amount of distracting information in his surroundings. Indeed, it is common to hear a child with SLI use one inflectional ending correctly but then stumble over another: sometimes the same ending, and sometimes even within the same sentence. But perhaps the most pressing problem of all for the language gene argument is simply the fact that 20% - 50% of subjects diagnosed with SLI recover fully, provided they begin intensive speech language therapy early enough (see Leonard, 1998). This fact might, of course, simply indicate that these children had been wrongly diagnosed. But in the vast majority of these cases, the childs recovery is clearly the direct result of intensive speech-language therapy.
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Since Gopnik et al. (1997) are postulating an irremediable mechanical breakdown, they must convince us that these subjects only appear to contravene their thesis. Their solution is that: although the language-impaired subjects sometimes appear to produce the correct surface form, further analysis of their performance as a whole shows that these forms are produced not by a hierarchically organized system of abstract rules operating on grammatical categories but rather by very specific compensatory strategies, including memorization of inflected forms as unanalyzed lexical items and the conscious application of learned explicit rules (Ibid, p. 115). The justification for this hypothesis is said to lie in the fact that the theory accurately predicts certain characteristic kinds of response (e.g., reaction time latencies) and morphosyntactic errors (e.g.,
overregularizations or poor results on novel word tests) (Gopnik et al., 1997). This argument represents an extension of Pinkers (1991) dual mechanism hypothesis: viz, whereas in the case of the normal child, regular inflectional forms involve the acquisition of an implicit rule (that is applied unconsciously) and irregular forms are learned (memorized) on a case-by-case basis (and applied consciously), in the case of SLI the child learns all verb forms using the latter cognitive process. In other words, the normal subject is able to extract morphological rules for regular inflectional endings from the language that they hear, but the SLI subject is unable to construct implicit rules for morphological processes on the basis of the input they receive: all inflectional forms are learned on a case-by-case basis. Thus, whereas the normal child acquires these abstract rules without any formal instruction and applies them unconsciously, automatically, and
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI effortlessly, the SLI child can only acquire them laboriously, from formal speech-language therapy, using cognitive skills as a compensatory mechanism: i.e., the subject stores inflected forms as unanalyzed wholes (for irregular as well as regular forms). The language gene argument invites a number of obvious objections. One very important question is how the generativist can reconcile this use of the dual mechanism hypothesis with the poverty of the stimulus argument; for on Gopnik et al.s (1997) theory, it turns out that subjects can indeed learn how to speak in a manner which, as far as formal language-testing is concerned, passes as normal: purely on the basis of explicit rules, memory, and imitation. Furthermore, even though the 1998 study of Fisher et al. may seem to lend weight to the language gene argument, insofar as they isolated a mutated region of chromosome 7 in the affected members of the KE family, it is important to bear in mind that Fisher et al. go on to stress that the affected members of the KE family suffer from pervasive language problems, severe orofacial and speech dyspraxia, and significantly, that 13 of the affected family members have an IQ ranging in the 63 to 80 range, while 2 have an IQ of 81. These findings confirm Vargha-Khadem et al.s earlier report (1995) that the affected members of the KE family suffer from far more extensive deficits than had been described by Gopnik in her 1990 article in Nature. Still, the language gene argument raises an intriguing question, quite apart from how these concerns regarding Gopnik et al.s (1997) analysis of the KE family, or larger groups of SLI subjects, should finally be resolved. In order to focus on this larger issue, we might almost treat Gopnik et al.s argument as if it were a thought-experiment. That is, what if
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI we should one day encounter a population which exhibits the sort of specific morphosyntactic deficit described by Gopnik et al., with no attendant cognitive, communicative, speech, or auditory processing impairments? An extended family, say, in which the affected members have a mutation at some precise chromosomal locus, and are unable to detect morphosyntactic patterns? Would we thereby have validated the view that speakers of a language have an internalized set of abstract rules guiding their utterances (Gopnik et al., 1997, p. 114)? Or would such a phenomenon constitute an incentive to search for some deeper explanation of these subjects strikingly narrow behavioral deficits?
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate over the Nature and Causes of SLI
The most striking features of the generativist view of SLI are: 1. Its fatalistic attitude; for a child diagnosed with SLI is regarded as if he were like one of those factory-sealed digital watches that cannot be mended when it breaks.9 2. The virtual exclusion of all other aspects of development; for language is above all seen as an autonomous system whose design principles and acquisition can only be explained in terms that are specific to that system. Thus, there is virtually
Cf. Richardsons remark that genetic determinism fosters a fatalistic view of human development in cognitive ability as in height or other physical attributes. Just as they [genetic determinists] are vague about means and contents of cognitive development, nativists are nebulous about targets and possibilities for intervention in development, such as education (Richardson, 1998, p. 34).
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI no discussion in generativist writings on SLI of the subjects emotional or social development or their prelinguistic communicative skills. 3. The virtual exclusion of all contextual aspects of linguistic communication. That is, the language of the child suffering from SLI is completely decontextualized; what one studies are such things as a corpus of the childs utterances in an interview setting, or the childs performance on novel word tests, to ascertain whether or not these texts display evidence of, e.g., some abstract morphosyntactic rule. 4. The treatment of SLI as a genetic disorder akin to Fragile X syndrome. It is because it is thought to represent such a pure case of language impairment that SLI has the appeal that it does for the generativist. But the very conception of SLI proposed by the generativist is one which presupposes a pure case scenario. On the variant reading pursued by interactionists, the most important feature of SLI is how the causes and the symptoms can be so markedly different in different children; for what this tells us is that there is no simple or single process leading up to SLI. Rather, what one needs to look at are the effects that biological challenges can have on a childs early dyadic interactions, and thence, on the childs development (see Owens, 1996; Greenspan, Wieder & Simons, 1998). As is generally the case in contentious issues such as this, a significant part of the problem in dealing with the generativist/interactionist debate over the nature and causes of SLI is the radically divergent methodological orientation that one finds in their
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI respective writings. Generativists tend to focus on the presence or absence of syntactic constructions (and at that, they are mostly concerned with inflectional endings). This approach reinforces the picture of SLI as an isolated grammatical disorder. Yet there are substantial indications in the literature that children diagnosed as having SLI invariably experience significant communicative and/or socioaffective challenges at a young age10 (see Fujiki & Brinton, 1994). The generativist regards the latter problems as secondary deficits: the consequence of a language impairment. But the interactionist views these deficits as the causes rather than the effects of SLI, and indeed, sees SLI itself as a secondary phenomenon (see Greenspan, 1997b). Thus, SLI is seen in radically different terms: whereas the generativist treats SLI as a unitary disorder which is present from birth and is unaffected by other developmental factors, the interactionist lays great stress on the heterogeneity and, naturally enough, the interaction between the multiple causes of SLI.11 According to the latter viewpoint, far from being the consequence of a breakdown in a specific, autonomous system or module, SLI is the result of biological problems that are compounded by the childs environment. That is, as is the case with the child suffering from autism, the SLI childs impairments affect the manner in which others interact with him, thereby contributing further to the childs impaired linguistic development. In other words, whereas the generativist views SLI as a condition which resides wholly inside the childs head, the
Indeed, in one of their early reports on the KE family, Gopnik and Crago reported that the affected children are almost unintelligible until they are about 7 years old (Gopnik & Crago 1991: 4). 11 The population of SLI children is a heterogeneous one, generally described as having a linguistic system which, in certain significant respects, is different from that of their normal language-learning peers (Conti-Ramsden, 1994, p. 184).
10
25
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI interactionist sees SLI as the result of a complex interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors. It is important to be clear on how the two sides view each others argument. From the generativist perspective, interactionism merely trivializes SLI; for it ignores the one feature that makes SLI such a fascinating issue: the simple fact that language can be selectively impaired. Surely what this tells us, according to the generativist, is that SLI is the result of a mutation in the gene that contains the plan common to the grammars of all languages (Pinker, 1994, p. 22). The interactionist sees the paradigm case of Grammatical SLI as a generativist oversimplification which will be exposed as such by closer examination of subjects diagnosed as having SLI. Is this debate anything more than an empirical matter that will only be resolved by careful testing? Or rather, is this debate anything more than a question of emphasis: of how much weight one should assign to genetic factors and how much to the environment in studying language acquisition? Or is there a more profound issue underlying the generativist/interactionist debate over SLI? Clearly, the two sides are deeply divided over the nature, and perhaps even the very existence of SLI as a distinct disorder. But this is not simply because they take such differing views of abnormal language development; rather, it is because they have such fundamentally differing views of language development in general. For as we saw in the opening section, the generativist views the childs acquisition of language as a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions (Chomsky, 1966, p. 65); but the interactionist emphasizes that:
26
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI 1. Linguistic functioning exists only with respect to contextual influences. Those contextual influences at the very least include language itself, interpersonal interactions and relationships, and situational constraints. 2. Language is learned not because it is a private symbol system, but because it is a means of communicating with others. Language is embedded in a social context, from the earliest rudiments of language learning to subsequent adult use. The dynamic interplay between language learner and the social environment implies that children are not passive recipients of knowledge, nor are they simply self-motivated to seek information and test hypotheses. 3. The learning of linguistic skills crosses into other social and cognitive domains (Goldstein & Hockenberger 1991: 402-3). One way to clarify the significance of this fundamental conceptual divergence over the nature of language development is to contrast generativist and interactionist views on what should be included and what should be excluded in a normative profile of the milestones of language development. The generativist stresses how nearly all children develop the same language skills at virtually the same time in the same invariant sequence. Thus, children are said to acquire language like clockwork. Whether a baby is born in Stockholm, Tokyo, Zimbabwe or Seattle, at 3 months of age, a typically developing infant will coo. At about 7 months the baby will babble. By their first birthday, infants will have produced their first words, and by 18 months, 2-word combinations. Children of all cultures know enough about language to carry on an intricate
27
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI conversation by 3 years of age (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1997, p. 7). And the reason why we see this regularity is said to be because the development of language is under maturational control: i.e., neurobiologically determined by unitary timing constraints (Petitto, 1997, p. 51).12 But then, children display considerable variability in the development of their linguistic skills: not simply in the age at which they master the various milestones listed above, but also in regards to which of the above steps they actually go through (see Fenson et al., 1994). It is not uncommon for a child to go directly from babbling to multiword utterances,13 or for a child to lose a word or a construction that she seemed to have mastered. And in a significant number of cases, a child who had appeared to be developing normal linguistic skills may suddenly, between the ages of 2 and 3, revert to a nonverbal state (which is often a parents first indication that their child is suffering from a pervasive developmental disorder). But the real problem here, from the interactionist perspective, concerns not just the uniformity presupposed by the generativist picture of language acquisition but also, the many additional steps and stages which are vital to a childs language development (see Owens, 1996). For example, joint attention and the social smile emerge around the age of 2 months; beginning around 3 months a child will turn its head to see where a sound is coming from and will react when it hears its name; at
12
Of all the mechanist metaphors which continually crop up in generativist writings -- e.g., language is described as a cognitive structure (Pinker, 1994, p. 24), a recursive system (Gopnik et al., 1997, p.111), or a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains (Pinker, 1994, p. 18) -- perhaps the most expressive of all is the cover of Vivian Cooks Inside Language (1997), which shows the title inset against a picture of gears and sprockets.
28
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI 6 - 9 months a child will start to shake its head to indicate no; around 9 months it will start to gesture to request things; and by 12 months it is intentionally pointing at things. All these phenomena, and many more subtle aspects of socioaffective and communicative development, should, according to the interactionist perspective, be included in the list of milestones of language development (see Adamson, 1995). An important sidebar to this the generativist/interactionist debate over what should be included in the normative stages of language development is the concomitant nativist/interactionist debate over the role of motherese or infant directed speech (IDS) in language development. Interactionists have sought to show how IDS plays a universal facilitative role in language development (see Richards & Gallaway, 1994). Because generativists are committed to a picture of language acquisition as governed by factors that are solely inside the childs head (i.e., a master gene), they have countered that there is no evidence of negative feedback in IDS: that, if anything, caregivers simply ignore the ungrammaticality of what their child is saying and comment instead on the content of the childs utterance (see Pinker, 1994), and further, that in certain cultures, primary caregivers do not engage in IDS at all with their children (see Ochs & Schieffelin, 1995). This criticism of IDS can be traced back to Golds proof that only finite-state languages are learnable from Text Presentation, and that to learn an open-ended language the system must be exposed to positive and negative information (see Gold, 1967). But such a criticism, which is grounded in the computational view of language-generation, may
13
Recall the story of Lord Macaulay whose first words, after having some hot tea spilled on him at the age of 4, were reputed to be Thank you, madam, the agony is sensibly ablated. A similar story is told of Einstein.
29
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI misconstrue the true significance of IDS; for it seems that the real question here is not whether caregivers respond differentially to childrens grammatical and ungrammatical utterances (although there is evidence that this in fact is the case14) but rather, whether IDS plays a crucial role in the childs emotional development, and what significance this might have for the childs communicative and linguistic development. Monnot (1999) has recently discovered that there is a significant positive correlation between the use of IDS and an infants growth. And what we have learnt most forcefully from studying children with severe language impairments is that one cannot divorce the childs affective states from her developing linguistic abilities: not simply because affect is so important for the childs motivation to attend to language but also, because the significance which a word, or which even language itself has for an infant, is bound up with her affects (see Greenspan, 1997b). Even in those cultures in which the primary caregivers (putatively) do not fine-tune their infants early language (see Crago, Shanley, Hough-Eyamie & HoughEyamie, 1997), we find that they nonetheless engage in the sort of affect-enriched speech described by Monnot and Greenspan, which seems to be so crucial for the childs ability and desire to expend the effort required to master language (see Briggs, 1998). Finally, generativists and interactionists are deeply divided over the very principles of speech/language therapy for children diagnosed with SLI. Interestingly, it is the generativist who favors a behavioral modification approach, with the emphasis placed on drill and any other techniques that can be shown to aid with memorization and language training. But the interactionist stresses that the design of a therapeutic program for a child
E.g., they tend to repeat more of the ill-formed than well-formed ones, and these repetitions often
14
30
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI suffering from SLI must be interactive, must be individually tailored to each child, and further, must consist of a multiple, integrated approach which addresses the childs primary as well as his secondary problems (and to repeat, language delay will commonly be just one aspect of the childs deficits). Moreover, the interactionist cautions about the use of formal language tests; for generally speaking, one can only make a proper assessment of a childs deficits by observing him over an extended period, in various environments, interacting naturally with his caregivers and peers. A comprehensive therapeutic approach can then be implemented, based on each childs biological strengths and weaknesses, which is designed to encourage the child to attend to people, objects and language, and to engage in intentional communicative and linguistic behavior (see Wetherby, Warren & Reichle, 1998).15
The (Stunted) Growth of Knowledge
It is not simply the meteoric rise of generativism in the 1960s that is deeply puzzling; so too is its seeming invulnerability to critical scrutiny. From the start, philosophers had responded vigorously to the bifurcation Chomsky sought to draw between language and communication. In Goodmans memorable words, the emperor needs to be told that his wise men, like his tailors, deceive him; that just as the body covered with the miraculous cloth has nothing on it, the mind packed with innate ideas has nothing in it (Goodman,
include corrections (see Sokolov & Snow, 1997).
31
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI 1969, p. 79). Furthermore, functionalist and integrationist linguists had mounted a serious challenge to the generativist view of language as a decontextualized bi-planar code (see Halliday, 1975; Harris, 1980). Yet generativism was able to portray these attacks as amounting to little more than rearguard attempts to maintain some sort of humanist status quo. Once again one must turn to the conceptual environment that nurtured generativism if one is to understand its imperviousness to philosophical and linguistic critique. From a philosophical perspective, the hardest part of dealing with the language gene argument is simply understanding what exactly it means or involves. In one sense it is deceptively easy to answer this question; one need only repeat such familiar precepts as the generativist mantra that a normal speaker of a language is born with the knowledge that the meaning of an utterance relies on the structural relationships that obtain between phrases rather than on the sequence of words. But how exactly is this implicit knowledge supposed to manifest itself in language use? When generativists speak of a child as being guided by an internalized set of abstract rules (Gopnik et al., 1997), what they have in mind is the idea that certain parts of the neocortex are pre-configured to detect patterned regularities in linguistic input (see Marcus et al., 1999). Herein lies the reason why a child is said to pick up morphosyntax automatically, regardless of whether the child is exposed to IDS: viz, the mind/brain is said to contain a modular system that is sensitive to abstract formal distinctions (for example, root versus derived, noun versus
15
Depending on the nature and severity of the childs regulatory and motor problems, this can involve interactive therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, parent therapy, and psycho-educational counselling (see Greenspan, 1997a).
32
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI verb), more sophisticated than the kinds of rules that are explicitly taught, developing on a schedule not timed by environmental input, organized by principles that could not have been learned (Pinker, 1991, p. 534). But how does the child grasp the significance of these formal distinctions or what it is supposed to do with them once its brain has detected them? Even more puzzling is the fact that generativists persist in describing this innately programmed behavior as a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently (Pinker, 1994, p. 18). But it is difficult to see in what sense one can continue to refer to a behavior as a skill when its development is regarded as a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions (Chomsky, 1966).16 For the upshot of such an argument is that those attributes which are necessarily yoked to the development of skills -- e.g., effort, practice, even learning -- can have no bearing whatsoever on language acquisition. Hence the constant refrain in generativist writings that a child acquires language automatically, effortlessly, and unconsciously. What this argument means is that it makes no sense to speak of children as trying or choosing to speak like others; for the mind/brain of a child learning how to speak is likened to a
We do indeed refer to the ability of various organs to perform such-and-such a function. Consider, e.g., how the ability of the eye to accommodate distance depends on the flexibility of the lens, which in turn depends on the addition of new cells to the centre of the lens. But these stages of embryological growth do not represent the maturation of ocular skills; and the eye does not lose the skills it once possessed when the lens becomes too stiff to change its shape because of the number of cells that have died off.
16
33
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Turing machine which is formulating the structural rules contained in a textual corpus (Pinker, 1994, chapter 3). Indeed, the child with SLI is treated like a Turing Machine whose self-modifying algorithm for extracting morphological rules for regular inflectional endings is missing or defective. And as we saw above, the child with SLI who recovers is being compared to a computer that is equipped with a backup system that enables it to store inflected verbs on a case-by-case basis; just as a user might not notice the difference when applying this defective program, so too the child with SLI who has undergone speech-language therapy only appears to have caught up in his knowledge of language. One possibly attractive result of this thesis is that it means that the child with SLI is now absolved of making any grammatical errors, insofar as a faulty program that asks Where did you goed? has no more made a mistake than has a Pattern Recognition system which picks out screws instead of bolts from a conveyor belt. For in order to make a mistake it must be possible to do something correctly; but computers -- and brains -- can do neither. A computer which malfunctions, or a brain which has suffered damage, is not guilty of errors or oversights. Only agents who have mastered a normative practice -- i.e., who can explain or justify their actions by appealing to a rule -- can perform the actions of that practice correctly or incorrectly. Similarly, only an agent who is capable of asking what an expression means, or what something is called, is capable of learning how to speak (see Taylor, 1997). Significantly, this is a point which, in a different context, the generativist himself emphasizes; for in the debates over ape language research, the generativist (rightly)
34
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI insists that one of the hallmarks of language development is the childs ability to engage in reflexive discourse about linguistic practices: e.g., being able to explain or ask what a word means, or what something is called, or why so-and-so said such-and-such (see Wallman, 1992; Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1998). But the upshot of the language gene argument is that we are wrong to treat the various kinds of meta-linguistic utterances that a subject comprehends or produces as demonstrating their language proficiency. For uttered surface forms provide evidence about the properties of the abstract rules, but do not in themselves constitute language. It is the grammar, the set of abstract rules producing the utterances, that constitutes language, and therefore it is this grammar that must be characterized if we want to understand any language, even impaired language (Gopnik et al., 1997, p. 114). Thus, the generativist is not being metaphorical when he suggests that in certain fundamental respects we do not really learn language; rather, grammar grows in the mind (Chomsky, 1980, p. 64). For what the debate over SLI shows us is that the generativist is committed to the principle that a child cannot learn language: If the childs knowledge of the abstract principles of language is not (according to generativist precepts) present at birth, it turns out that this knowledge cannot -- despite the strenuous efforts of a child, his caregivers, his teachers, and his therapists -- ever be acquired. Thus, the terms that one uses to describe Petes language deficits are no different than the terms computer scientists use to describe the bugs in a language program. And if Pete should, through the help of intervention, begin to master the use of
35
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI contractions and infinitives, then one must describe this change in his speech-behavior in terms which continue to adhere to the paradigm of a Turing Machine that has been modified by analogues, in Turings famous terms, of pleasure and pain stimuli that give the desired modification to a machines character (Turing, 1948, p. 121). The consequences of this argument badly need to be clarified; for what is involved here is not just a tentative explanation of a language disorder but further, a sweeping revision of our understanding of complex human behavior (see Button, Coulter, Lee & Sharrock, 1995; Howe, 1999). For, although he may not draw attention to this fact, the generativists conception of language skills is dramatically different from what one finds in developmental writings. The generativist treats understanding and speech as the end-result of mechanical translation processes (from mentalese into a natural language and vice versa) in much the same way that the words that appear on a visual display unit are the end-result of a series of translations from a programs high-level language to the machine language (as performed by symbolic assemblers which convert the program into machine code (see Pinker, 1994). Thus, when the generativist speaks of language as a complex, specialized skill he does not mean this in the sense in which one refers to a child as learning, e.g., how to play chess, but rather in the sense that one refers to Big Blue as being able to beat all but the best of grandmasters. But the idea that Big Blue demonstrates (extraordinary) chess skill rests on the fundamental -- and questionable -presupposition, which lies at the heart of AI, that the concept of mechanically following a
36
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI rule is equivalent to the computational notion of following a mechanical rule (see Shanker, 1998, chapter 1). Far from being deterred by this objection, strong AI theorists trumpet the revisionist outcome of their argument as one of the foremost virtues of AI (see Minsky, 1986). Generativists have not been nearly so forthright, however, about the extent to which their conception of language knowledge and skill has been similarly revised. For example, the poverty of the stimulus makes heavy use of the argument that a young child knows, e.g., that anaphors are bound within a clause. But when the generativist speaks of a child as knowing that a construction is grammatical or ungrammatical, he means this in the same sense as when a computer scientist speaks of a program as knowing that a certain string is well-formed or ill-formed. That is, the generativists use of knowing is not at all the same as occurs when one speaks of a child as being able to follow the rules of the game, which necessarily involves knowing when he is breaking those rules. But then, according to the generativist, this comparison is simply misplaced; for there are said to be major and fundamental differences between rules of language and rules of games. The former are biologically determined; the latter are arbitrary (Lenneberg, 1967, p. 2). Thus, the generativist defends his use of the term language skill on the grounds that he is still dealing with rules of language, even though these rules are conceived as patterned regularities whose detection is brought about by systems that are genetically determined. One might think that all that is needed to dispose of this argument is to show how it confuses normativity with causality (see Baker & Hacker, 1984). But then, this type of
37
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI objection has had no more impact on generativist thinking than on the mindset of the strong AI theorist; for it only serves to inspire the reductionist response that knowing (following, breaking) a rule should always be placed in inverted commas, until such time as cognitive science can explain what is going on at the pre-conscious level -- i.e., inside an agents brain -- when he or she knows something. Thus Chomsky proposed an alternative, provisional term -- cognizing -- for speaking about linguistic knowledge. Cognizing is supposed to do all of the work of the ordinary epistemic operator, with the added benefit that it can also/only be applied to mechanisms like brains and computers (see Chomsky, 1980). The problem with this maneuver, however, is that we now have to qualify what we mean when we describe a child as trying or as choosing to speak like the other members of her community. For the computational metaphor requires us to describe a child in the same way as one describes the operations of a computer tout court. Thus, all of the normative terms that one uses to talk about language development must be construed as potentially misleading expressions that are grounded in an antiquated mentalist dogma, and hence, that must be reformulated in a rigorous account of language acquisition. That is, all of the normative terms involved in the description of a child as a linguistic agent would have to be subjected to reductionist analysis. What one is left with is indeed a computational device whose linguistic processing is automatic, effortless, and uniform: but only because it makes no sense to speak of a computer, in the same way as one speaks
38
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI of a child, as trying to speak, or making mistakes, or learning from her errors, understanding an explanation, or observing and imitating other peoples behavior. Ultimately, then, the issue which the nativist/interactionist debate over SLI brings to the fore is the archetypal problem of whether the development of human skills -- of which language has long been a paradigm example -- can be explained in mechanist terms, or whether mechanist reductionism only ends up subverting the essentially intentional and normative character of human learning (see Howe, 1990; Taylor, 1997). That is, the debate over SLI highlights the problems involved in construing the concept of speaking correctly or incorrectly on the paradigm of being mechanically guided by the construction and inference rules for deriving a well-formed formula in a formal system (see Shanker, 1998). For the concept of speaking correctly is fundamentally tied to an agents intentions, to a societys linguistic norms, and to the communicative context in which a speech act occurs. If Pete, for example, is merely imitating how his friend Billy talks, or if Pete were aged 1 year old instead of 6, his linguistic efforts would not be grounds for therapeutic intervention. And, in the actual circumstances, Petes mother is more likely to feel his forehead than to lecture him on the correct use of contractions. But even should she should choose the latter course, she would be trying to teach him how to speak correctly: not frobbing the settings on her sons speech circuits (see Pinker, 1994). In the determinist environment which existed in the 1950s and 60s, all of the problems that have been examined in this section could be dismissed as nothing more than the trifling concerns of the ordinary language philosopher: the so-called guardian of
39
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI semantic inertia (Gregory, 1987). That is, the strains in the generativist analysis of normative and reflexive concepts could be represented as inconsequential aspects of conventional linguistic practices, which as such should not be allowed to impede semantic progress (Ibid). But a very different conceptual environment exists today. Once again psychologists are stressing that, far from being acquired automatically, unconsciously, and effortlessly, Human abilities are acquired through learning, and this normally involves conscious effort. Learning plays a large role in making people the individual adults they become, as well as equipping people with the skills and abilities they require. As an outcome of engaging in learning activities we gain various kinds of skills, and we also acquire useful knowledge (Howe, 1999, p. 18). This return to a view of the child as trying, even working at becoming a member of her linguistic community (see Shatz, 1994) is an integral aspect of the interactionist view that the linguistic world into which the child is entering is a reflexively enculturated world (see Shanker & Taylor, in press). But that is not to suggest that the genotype has somehow become irrelevant on this social interactionist framework; rather, it signifies that even the role of genetic factors can only be understood within the context of the culture in which a child develops.
The Triumph of Epigenesis
40

[A] conceptual revolution [is] now under way [in embryology]. The shift in discourse we are now seeing in the literature marks a conceptual shift of startling magnitude; it will require us to learn how to think in radically new ways (Keller, 1995, p. 30).
The closing line of the preceding section goes against everything that the genetic determinist holds true. For according to the classical Mendelian view, genes are the direct sources of discrete phenotypic characters. The information which is encoded in the genes leads to a unidirectional unfolding of determinate stages. According to the Central Dogma of Mendelian genetics, DNA is copied into RNA which in turn codes for (provides a template for) the stringing together of the sequence of amino acids that makes a protein (Rose, 1997, p. 120). Information cannot somehow leak back into the genes. Hence one cannot speak of the input of something as far-removed as culture on a geneticallycontrolled maturational process (Rose, 1997, p. 120). For the environment cannot alter the actual content of the information that is contained in the genes; it can only affect the extent to which a character is realized, or the form in which a character is realized. That is, the gene predetermines the limits of a characters development: a good environment will allow the full potential contained in the gene to be expressed, while a poor environment will only allow for partial expression (pace the role of nutrition on height). And just as the same genetic blueprint might lead a chick to imprint on a turkey hen in one environment and a human being in another, so too the same genetic blueprint might lead a child to acquire English in one environment and Japanese in another. 41
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI All of the advances that were made in psycholinguistics in the 1960s seemed to bear out this genetic determinist thesis. For the more psychologists studied the micro-steps involved in language acquisition, the more they were struck by the trans-cultural regularity in language development. To be sure, it turned out that age was a relatively poor predictor of language development, but Mean Length of Utterance (i.e., the average number of morphemes in a childs utterances) was found to be a surprisingly reliable indicator of language development (at least in the early stages -- i.e., up to 4.0). We touched on some of the so-called milestones of normative development above; but perhaps most striking of all was Browns (1973) discovery that, for English-speakers, the development of grammatical morphology occurs in a remarkably predictable order. Is it any wonder, given the conceptual environment sketched in the opening section, that psycholinguists should have been so inclined to accept the generativist view that language constitutes the ultimate example of a canalized complex behavior? But ours is a very different conceptual environment today. In place of the preformationist view of genes as independent beads-on-a-string which determine phenotypic traits, genes are now seen as resources utilized by a dynamic system in a regulated manner (Richardson, 1998, p. 58). We now understand that, while structural genes code for proteins, up to 90% of genes are regulatory genes that influence the expression of structural genes (Ibid, p. 52ff). Moreover, there are several other levels that can influence gene expression in a hierarchical developmental system consisting of:
gene
42

chromosome nucleus cytoplasm tissue organism environment.
Not only is gene expression affected by other genes in the genome, the cellular environment, the extracellular environment, and the external environment, but as McClintock showed, even the actual DNA sequence can be modified by developmental processes17 (see Keller, 1983). Thus, genes are part of a totally interrelated, fully coactional developmental system. They do not produce differentiated phenotypic traits by themselves. Even paradigm fixed traits (e.g., eye colour) are not solely determined by genes.18 For At each level of the developmental system, the effect of any level of influence is dependent on the rest of the system, making all factors potentially interdependent and mutually constraining (Gottlieb, Wahlsten & Lickliter, 1998, p. 260). Hence The minimum unit for developmental analysis must be the developmental system, comprised of both the organism and the set of physical, biological, and social factors with which it interacts over the course of development (Ibid). As far as this last set of factors is concerned, all sorts of
We have even seen a revival of the idea of a Lamarckian mechanism: viz., gene expression is influenced by DNA structure and by proteins that are intermeshed with the DNA, which is called chromatin. Chromatin structure can be changed by environmental factors, and these chromatin structural changes can be passed on to the next generation, although the DNA base sequence remains unchanged (Jablonka & Lamb, 1995).
17
43
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI studies have confirmed the importance of the environment on ontogeny: e.g., the effects of social interactions, day length, or temperature on normal phenotypic traits such as coloration, sex, or seasonal polyphenisms. In the case of humans, the presence of teratogens has alarmingly demonstrated the potential influence of environmental factors on fetal and neonatal development. We have also learnt how something as basic as social interaction can cause hormones to be secreted which result in the activation of DNA transcription inside the cell nucleus (see Rose, 1997; van der Weele, 1999). And our knowledge of the formative role that dyadic interaction plays on an infants neurobiological development is growing by leaps and bounds (see Schore 1994). Thus, if one simply considers the effect of social changes on nutrition, or on family structure, or on caregiving practices, one can easily appreciate why the interactionist insists that the role of genetic factors can only be understood within the context of the culture in which a child develops. But then, what about the so-called canalized behaviors and traits which, according to the genetic determinist, are brought about through natural selection? The interactionist answer to this question is that this probabilistic view of epigenesis presents us with a completely different way of conceptualizing evolution. According to the genetic determinist view, evolution is entirely gene-based: i.e., caused by genetic changes or mutations (one need only think here of Chomskys (1998) Big Bang explanation of origins of language). But in probabilistic epigenetic terms, evolution can occur without any actual change in DNA sequence (see fn. 16); or can first occur at the experiential level,
Mendelian ratios are regarded as a very special case: one in which environmental factors are minimal.
18
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI which subsequently leads to changes in the genotype (in the actual structure of genes or in gene expression). For natural selection applies to the whole developmental manifold, not just the genes. Conversely, evolutionary stability does not simply refer to genotypic stability but rather, to the stability of a developmental manifold. Hence certain developmental outcomes are species-typical because the organism is responsive to a narrow range of stimuli (see Gottlieb, 1997). In other words, the predictability of development need not be a reason to postulate special causal devices generating necessity, such as programs or plans or any other controlling agency; for highly predictable developmental outcomes are just as much the result of highly predictable environmental circumstances (van der Weele, 1999, p. 41, p. 119f). According to the genetic determinist conception of canalization, species-typical traits are buffered from environmental perturbations by an organisms genes. But Gottliebs (1997) experiments on wood ducklings in the 1970s and 80s showed that certain experiences which a species normally undergoes can play a canalizing role in development. Lorenz (1952) had overlooked this possibility; for he performed his famous imprinting experiments on waterfowl and chicks that were hatched in incubators, thus effectively excluding the role of canalizing experiences. But Gottlieb demonstrated that the expression of what would normally be classified as instinctive or innate (i.e., predetermined) behavior in newborns is in fact regulated in very non-obvious ways by prenatal experience.19 In particular, he showed how a ducklings auditory experience of
19
Cf. Masatakas (1994) demonstration that squirrel monkeys innate fear of snakes derives from their experience with live insects and Wallmans (1979) discovery that chicks innate perception of mealworms as food derives from seeing their own toes move. Cf. also, Gottliebs remark that, for Kuo, a
45
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI its own vocalizations or its siblings vocalizations during the embryonic period contributes to the ducklings identification of the maternal call of its species (see Gottlieb, 1997). Thus Gottlieb demonstrated how species-typical experiences can bring about species-specific behavior in ducklings (and can also render the organism unresponsive to non-species behavior). That is, he showed how canalizing influences can bring about a narrowing or enhanced specificity of responsiveness: it is typical or normal experience, together with the genotype, that is responsible for species-specific development. Similarly, Ingold (1995) has argued that even the appearance of a species-typical human behavior like walking, which would commonly be cited as a paradigm for the genetic determinist thesis, cannot be separated from its canalizing influences. For the fact is that an infant deprived of normal caregiving is unlikely to survive, much less learn how to walk. Nor can one begin to estimate the importance of the infants desire to behave like those around her for the effort that she devotes to learning how to walk. Moreover, different cultures use different techniques to teach their children how to walk; this results, not only in significantly different styles of walking but also, in significantly different ages at which a child begins to walk. Amongst the youngest children in the world to learn how to walk are the Kipsigis of Kenya who, when quite young, are placed in a seated position in holes dug in the ground and propped up with blankets. At the other extreme are the infants in Iranian orphanages that Wayne Dennis (1960) studied. These children spent almost all of their time lying on their backs in cribs. When they did finally begin to locomote, they would scoot around in a sitting position rather than crawl. Only 15% of
psychology based on instinct was an armchair psychology and, as such, it was not an investigative
46
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI these children could walk alone by the age of 3-4 (Berk, 1997).20 Strictly speaking, therefore, bipedalism cannot be attributed to the human organism unless the environmental context enters into the specification of what that organism is (Ingold, 1995, p. 191; see Ingold, 1998). And as Ingold goes on to point out, exactly the same point applies to language. What goes missing on the generativist account of language acquisition is precisely this whole question of the role of the bi-directional dynamic system in which language development takes place. When one considers the set of physical, biological, and social factors with which a child interacts over the course of her development, the thing that strikes one most forcefully is how uniform and stable the childs environment has been for the past several hundred thousand years. For the first 9 months a child is, of course, highly (but not totally) sheltered from external shocks. Moreover, several interesting experiments in recent years have indicated that the antecedents of language-learning may well lie in pre-natal experience. For example, neonates respond differentially to their mothers voice, or to the rhythm and prosody of poems read aloud by the mother during gestation (see Locke, 1993). And for approximately the first 2 years of postnatal life the childs environment remains remarkably stable and uniform; for during this time the child is almost exclusively engaged in dyadic and triadic interactions with her primary caregivers. Thanks to the work of Trevarthan (1979) and Bruner (1983), we now appreciate how the development of pre-linguistic communicative skills paves the way for
science (Gottlieb, 1997, p. 125).
47
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI the development of linguistic skills (see Shanker & Taylor in press). But we are still in the early stages of understanding just how serious it can be for a childs development if that early caregiving environment is severely disrupted. Overlooking the many exogenous facts that might disrupt normal dyadic interactions (e.g., illnesses suffered by the primary caregiver, or social factors which constrain the caregivers capacity to interact with their child), let us focus in the remainder on the effect of the various endogenous factors that might disrupt normal dyadic interaction. There appear to be three basic kinds of biological challenge that can impair or constrict a childs progression through the following developmental stages: the ability to self-regulate and to take in and respond to the world; to engage in relationships with other people; to engage in two-way communication; to engage in complex communicational sequences; to engage in make-believe play; and to describe and express ideas and feelings (Greenspan et al., 1998). The three basic biological problems are: 1. the childs senses may be under- or over-reactive 2. the child may have difficulty processing his sensations 3. the child may have difficulty controlling the movements of his body (Ibid). How a caregiver responds to a child with such biological challenges can have a major impact on that childs progress through the above developmental stages. For example, a child who is under-reactive to sensations may not respond at all to a caregivers attempts to initiate interactions, whereas a child who is over-reactive may respond by averting his
20
We now know that locomotor behaviour has a huge effect on an infants neurobiological development (see Schore, 1994). One can only wonder at the effect which these variances in motor development might have on the childrens cortico-cortical development.
48
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI gaze and withdrawing into himself. A child who has difficulty processing sensory information may engage in stereotypical movements in an attempt to control his environment, or react violently to any changes in his familiar routines. A child who has trouble controlling his bodily movements or sensing his body-space may find physical contact traumatic. A child who has difficulty planning or coordinating his actions may perseverate or resort to self-stimulatory behaviors. Such children present an exceptionally daunting challenge to their caregivers; for in order to avoid reinforcing the childs ultimately self-destructive attempts to cope with his environment, caregivers must structure their interactions in such a way that the child is encouraged to develop, without ever placing undue stresses on the child which will only serve to terminate the interaction. Or the child may use such idiosyncratic means in order to communicate that the caregiver does not even recognize these as intentional communicative behaviors. Thus, just as Wynne, Matthysse and Cromwell (1978) found that individuals who are at genetic risk for schizophrenia only develop the illness when their families display certain disordered interaction patterns, so too Greenspan et al. (1998) have argued that developmental disorders, including SLI, are the result of a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors. For example, A child with a severe auditory-processing problem, who doesnt understand most of what is said to him, may experience even greater problems with interaction (Greenspan et al., 1998, p. 42). To such a child, the world may be a hostile place, filled with sounds that make demands on him but to which he cant respond. He may come to feel shut out from the world of people, or, worse, people may
49
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI seem frightening, always yelling because he is so often angering and disappointing them (Ibid). If the caregiver does not employ communicational techniques that cater to and help the child overcome his biological impairments, the child is most likely to adopt behaviors that only serve to exacerbate his communicational and/or attentional problems. We can begin to see just how serious a breakdown in normal dyadic interaction can be for a childs linguistic development: a point that applies just as much to children with mild regulatory or motor problems as to children who have severe biological challenges. Thus Greenspan recounts how, contrary to early views that sensory differences were only present in very disturbed children, we found that these individual differences in varying degrees characterize many children and adults, in some contributing to psychopathology, in others creating challenges that are mastered (Greenspan, 1997a, p. 73). But rather than viewing this outlook as a dire warning about the potential hazards in childrearing, Greenspans approach holds out the promise that, the more we learn about tailoring interactive routines to each childs strengths and weaknesses, the more successful we shall be in helping biologically challenged children to develop on a more normal trajectory. The upshot of this argument is that it is fundamentally misconceived to try to explain the causes of a heterogeneous disorder like SLI as the result of a faulty gene. For the various symptoms of SLI are the end-result of a complicated interplay of multiple factors at varying levels in the childs developmental system. Moreover, far from being an uncomfortable anomaly for this picture of pervasive developmental disorders, the high
50
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI concordance rate of SLI in monozygotic (MZ) twins is entirely what one would expect on a probabilistic epigenetic approach. For once one removes the additive conception of development that underpins genetic determinism -- i.e., the premise that complex behaviors represent the summation of genetic and environmental factors (H X E) -- one can see where the real value of MZ experiments lies. When MZ twins that are reared apart show substantial differences, this does indeed reveal the importance of nongenetic factors on development. But in the case where MZ twins reared apart show substantial similarities, this does not corroborate the genetic determinist assumption that H (the genome) is an autonomous factor which can be isolated in MZ experiments; rather, it may indicate that the two environments are much more similar than is superficially obvious in some salient respect (e.g., caregiving behaviors); or it might reflect the importance of prenatal and neonatal environments for a childs long-term development (see Wahlsten, 1994, 1999). To see the significance of this point for the interactionist view of SLI, imagine the following scenario: to demonstrate the importance of environmental factors on language development, an interactionist scours the records to see if a case can be found where the same linguistic trait keeps cropping up from one generation to the next in an extended family. Here, the interactionist feels, will be compelling evidence of just how profound an influence caregivers can have on a childs development. It never even occurs to her that this research might constitute an example of how abstract knowledge gets passed on from one generation to the next; rather, she sees such research as confirming how an un-
51
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI varying environment can sustain similar abnormal behaviors in a genetically similar population. In other words, one can just as easily respond to the recent work that has been done on the KE family as reinforcing an interactionist as promoting a nativist view: everything depends on the conceptual vantage-point from which one views this data. A generativist framework leads the psychologist to focus exclusively on how the family members perform on various syntactic and novel word tasks. An interactionist framework demands that one learn much more about the children in this family: about their biological profiles (e.g., are they under-reactive or over-reactive to sensations?); their motor contol; their level of socioaffective development (e.g., do these children engage in make-believe play; do they readily express their feelings?); their cognitive development (e.g., do they manifest attentional problems? Are they able to inhibit nonsalient information?); their personality traits (e.g., are they highly passive and withdrawn?); and, of course, their communicative development. For signs of SLI can nearly always be observed during the childs second year, and parents of children with SLI often report that their child was slow to begin talking, and generally, did not go through the typical language explosion at 18 - 24 months (see Tomblin, 1997).21 In short, the interactionist sees in the KE family an opportunity to learn more about how a recurrent abnormal biological/environmental interplay influences a childs linguistic development, whereas the generativist sees in the KE family the possibility of identifying a core case of Grammatical SLI (i.e., one in which the subjects speech deficits
52
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI can be isolated from such factors as their orofacial apraxia). But what we are ultimately confronted with here is a fundamental disagreement over the possible importance of studying children with language disorders for our understanding of language development in general. The implications of the language gene argument are clear: When a child suffering from SLI recovers as a result of intensive speech-language therapy, this can only be because of their enhanced cognitive abilities. Thus, in one fell swoop we are denied the possibility of learning anything significant about the various processes involved in normal language development by studying children with language deficits. But on an interactionist approach, one believes that we can learn a great deal about normal language development by studying how such children can be brought to master various elements of language use. For one of the guiding ideas of dynamic systems theory is the concept of equifinality, which states that developing organisms of the same species can reach the same endpoint via different developmental pathways. That is, a. organisms that have the same initial conditions can reach the same endpoint via different development routes or trajectories, and b. developing organisms that have different initial conditions can reach the same endpoint.22 If we accept, in principle, that a child with some biological challenge that leads to SLI can, through speech-language therapy, reach the same endpoint as a typical child (as defined by normative language-testing), this does indeed require us to think in radically
It would also be interesting to know more about the familys socio-economic situation; for the incidence of SLI is higher for children from lower socio-economic homes (Ibid).
21
53
The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI new ways about language development. For in place of the genetic determinist view that complex abilities like cognition [or language are] inside us all along, albeit in smaller form, and get passed on to subsequent generations in that form, and just, as it were, grow in individuals (Richardson, 1998, p. 2), we will need to study the multidirectional, multi-level, context-sensitive development of complex abilities. According to Gottlieb, The triumph of epigenesis over the concept of preformation is that it has ushered in [an] era of truly developmental thinking (Gottlieb, 1997, p. 126). Equally we might say, it has ushered in a new era of psycholinguistic research.
22
Cf. Fischers application of this idea to the development of skills: different individuals will follow different developmental paths in the same skill domain (Fischer, 1980, p. 513).
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K., Alcock, K., Fletcher, P., & Passingham, R. (1995). Praxic and nonverbal cognitive deficits in a large family with a genetically transmitted speech and language disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92, 930-933. Waddington, C. H. (1957). The strategy of the genes. London: Allen and Unwin. Wahlsten, D. (1994). The intelligence of heritability. Canadian Psychology, 35(3), 244-264. Wahlsten, D. (1999). Single-gene influences on brain and behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 599-624. Wallman, J. (1979). A minimal visual restriction experiment: Preventing chicks from seeing their feet affects later responses to mealworms. Developmental Psychology, 12, 391-397. Wallman, J. (1992). Aping language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. (1953). Genetical implications of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. Nature, 171, 964-967. Wetherby, A. M., Warren, S. F., & Reichle, J. (1998). Transitions in prelinguistic communication (Vol. 7). Baltimore: Brookes. Wynne, L., Matthysse, S., & Cromwell, R. (1978). The nature of schizophrenia: New approaches to research and treatment. New York: Wiley.
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The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Author Note I am deeply indebted to the following people for their substantial help in regards to this paper: Ellen Bialystok, Jerome Bruner, Deanna Comfort, Bryant Furlow, Gilbert Gottlieb, Stanley Greenspan, Barbara King, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Talbot Taylor, and Sherman Wilcox.
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Running head: THE GENERATIVIST/INTERACTIONIST DEBATE OVER SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over Specific Language Impairment: Psycholinguistics at a Crossroads

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Canada

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI Abstract

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over Specific Language Impairment: Psycholinguistics at a Crossroads

The Epigenesis of Generative Grammar

The Language Gene Argument

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate over the Nature and Causes of SLI

The (Stunted) Growth of Knowledge

The Triumph of Epigenesis

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

The Generativist/Interactionist Debate Over SLI

chromosome nucleus cytoplasm tissue organism environment.

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