Ken Wexler (MIT)

Lenneberg’s Dream in our Time: Development, Learning and the Search for a Genetics of Language

Location: Humanities 1006

The study of language development today is among the most vibrant of the cognitive sciences, with stunning empirical results and many connections to other sciences, including linguistics, genetics and brain imaging. What causes language development in the child? Of course, much is learned, for example, particular words. What else is learned? What is caused by biology? What develops late or early under biological guidance?

The last 20 years of research in language acquisition have provided surprising answers to these questions. In this talk I’ll present some of these discoveries. One important domain will concern how verbs and tense develop. Some surprising empirical results show that children in many languages have a very particular pattern of development, in which they prefer producing verbs without tense, even when the forms of the untensed verbs are more complicated than the tensed ones. Yet the children know an amazing amount about how these verbs work. What is the cause of this utter discrepancy between great knowledge of particular pieces of language and much less knowledge about others? We will show a good deal of surprising data, discuss the answers and show how results in linguistic theory, experimental psychology, behavioral genetics and even genetics are integrating in a new science of language, connecting linguistics and biology. If time permits, we’ll also mention some very new unpublished results on brain imaging (fMRI) that promise to help us understand brain regions that are central to the particular aspects of the development of language.