Creating Language

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

An influential view in philosophy is that children acquire their first words through instrumental conditioning, so in a way that requires no understanding on their part. In fact infants have surprisingly sophisticated social skills. These are revealed in the creative aspects of acquisition of language.

Slides

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How Do Humans First Come to Communicate Using Words?

One influential view goes back to Bertrand Russell:

‘A child learning to speak is learning habits and associations which are just as much determined by the environment as the habit of expecting dogs to bark and cocks to crow.’ (Russell, 1921, p. 71)

What does Russell mean in writing that the habits are ‘determined by the environment’? Probably that they involve instrumental conditioning:

‘The child learns this language from the grown-ups by being trained to its use. I am using the word ‘trained’ in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an animal being trained to do certain things. It is done by means of example, reward, punishment, and suchlike.’ (Wittgenstein, 1972, p. 77)

And how does the environment determine Russell’s ‘habits and associations’? Probably through habitual processes:

‘the child’s early learning of a verbal response depends on society’s reinforcement of the response in association with the stimulations that merit the response’ ((Quine, 1960, p. 82); compare (Quine, 1974, pp. 28–9))

Quine is explicitly invoking a theory about learning (see Background: What Are Habitual Processes? for details). The child produces a particular words in response to a certain type of stimulus. They do this because (i) they have produced this word in response to that type of stimulus in the past; and (ii) when they did so, their action had a rewarding outcome.

On this view, what explains the actions of the child with their first words is not any belief about the word or desire to communicate. It is the strength of a stimulus–action connection.

This seems to be approximately Davidson’s own view.

‘Before we have an idea of truth or error, before the advent of concepts or propositional thought, there is a rudiment of communication in the simple discovery that sounds produce results. Crying is the first step toward language when crying is found to procure one or another form of relief or satisfaction. More specific sounds, imitated or not, are rapidly associated with more specific pleasures. Here use //p. 71// would be meaning, if anything like intention and meaning were in the picture.’ (Davidson, 2000, pp. 70–1)

Why Do Philosophers Hold This View?

What is the attraction, for a philosopher like Davidson writing long after Tolman (1948) and others had debunked the view that all learning involved habitual processes, of such a strong commitment to a bold (and, as we will see, clearly false) theory of how your first words are acquired?

Davidson is committed to the claim that if someone can think, she can communicate with words. It follows that acquiring words cannot involve thinking at the outset. This makes pressing the question, How could someone begin to acquire words without being able to think? And instrumental conditioning, together with the related notions of habitual processes, provide a potential answer—by being conditioned to utter a particular word in response to certain simulations!

How Do Humans Actually First Come to Communicate Using Words?

Children acquiring language create their own words before they learn to use those of the adults around them.

‘Some children are so impatient that they coin their own demonstrative pronoun. For instance, at the age of about 12 months, Max would point to different objects and say “doh?,” sometimes with the intent that we do something with the objects, such as bring them to him, and sometimes just wanting us to appreciate their existence.’ Bloom, 2000, p. 122; see further Clark, 1981; Clark, 1982)

One child’s first words included ‘bimbam’ for oranges and ‘mipmap’ for a type of colourful large plastic clip. Adults and older children sometimes respond not by attempting to train the child to use words as they do, but instead by borrowing the child’s word. If there is training in acquiring your first words, it is at least as much a matter of you training those around you as it is them training you.

Even where children have mastered a lexical convention, they will readily violate it in their own utterances in order to get a point across. For example:

‘From the time they first use words until they are about two or two-and-a-half, children noticeably and systematically overextend words. For example, one child used the word “apple” to refer to balls of soap, a rubber-ball, a ball-lamp, a tomato, cherries, peaches, strawberries, an orange, a pear, an onion, and round biscuits.’ (Clark, 1993, p. 35)

These points are beautifully illustrated by a conversation with June, a 15-month-old infant, recorded by Higginson (1985):¹

June puttaputta.
Mother puttaputta … ok.
Mother this puttaputta?
Mother Peter Piper picked a peck of pickle peppers
…
June puttaputta.
Mother puttaputta?
Mother Where’s puttaputta?
Mother Can you show me puttaputta?
June turns the page.

June puttaputta.
Mother That’s not puttaputta.

At this point, June’s mother clearly thinks that ‘puttaputta’ refers to Peter Piper. She attempts to correct June. But June resists correction. The conversation continues:

June puttaputta.
Mother puttaputta?
June puttaputta.
Mother ok … Doctor .
June takes the book, looks at it and then hands it back to her mother.
Mother Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain … he stepped into a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again.
June puttaputta.
Mother ok … the late Madame Fry wore shoes a mile high and when she walked by me I thought I should die.

June is attempting to use ‘puttaputta’ to get her mother to read to her. She quickly clears up her mother’s misunderstanding and gets what she wants. June continues to use ‘puttaputta’ in recorded conversations for roughly the next six months when she wants something read to her or to be told what something is. During this time her mother also uses ‘puttaputta’ in the way June initiated:

June putta.
June puttaputta.
Mother Am I supposed to read that?
Mother You have to come over here then.
June puttaputta.
Mother What do you want me to puttaputta?

As these conversations illustrate, acquiring your first words it at least sometimes not a matter of being trained: it is a matter of creating words that others then have to learn.

Why This Matters

On the training theories of lexical acquisition associated with Davidson, Quine and Wittgenstein, early word use is a consequence of instrumental conditioning. This implies that the sole source of systematicity in children’s early uses of words is training.

What predictions does this generate? One prediction is that children will not systematically use words in ways they have not been trained to use them in. But children create new words of their own, and they creatively misuse others’ words. In both cases, they use words systematically. But they do not initially use them in accordance with any kind of training they have received from others. Contrary to what training theories predict.

A further prediction of training theories of lexical acquisition is that children should not be able to acquire their first words without being trained in their use. As Bloom (2000, p. 8) notes, there are children who cannot speak and ‘produce only a few sounds’, so could receive little if any training (Goldin-Meadow, 2002 on homesigns; examples are provided in the seminar and slides). Some of these children nevertheless acquire rich vocabularies and can understand complex sentences, contrary to what training theories predicts.

Falsified predictions aside, the existence of homesigns poses a further challenge to anyone who holds that if you can think you can communicate with words. What needs to be explained is not merely how humans acquire their first words without thinking but how, without thinking, they could create words.

This may be fatal for Davidson’s view:

‘You can deceive yourself into thinking that the child is talking if it makes sounds which, if made by a genuine language user, would have a definite meaning. […] If a mouse had vocal cords of the right sort, you could train it to say ‘Cheese’. But that word would not have a meaning when uttered by the mouse […] Infants utter words in this way; if they did not, they would never come to have a language.’ (Davidson, 2001, p. 127).

Shipwreck Survivor?

According to Higginbotham, acquiring your first words is a matter of ‘coming to know the meanings of words, where at a given stage the learner’s conception is an hypothesis about the meaning’ (Higginbotham, 1998, p. 153).

This view is elaborated and defended by appeal to a rich variety of observational evidence by Clark. Her position involves two key claims. The first concerns a description of the problem to be solved in acquiring your first words:

‘One of the first problems children take on is the MAPPING of meanings onto forms … They must identify possible meanings, isolate possible forms, and then map the meanings onto the relevant forms’ (Clark, 1993, p. 14; compare Bloom, 2000, p. 242).

Clark’s second key claim concerns how children solve the problem. It is a matter of formulating and testing hypotheses about what particular words mean:

‘Adults offer both words and information about word meanings, and children try out their hypotheses about word meanings in their own uses of the words, with adults offering corrections when needed.’ (Clark, 2009, p. 122)

A variant of this view is developed by Bloom. As a key additional element, he proposes that children’s abilities to track others’ communicative intentions enable them to work out which words refer to which things (Bloom, 2000, p. 60).

These theories—call them shipwreck survivor theories—of how children acquire their first words have a long history.²

The existence of homesigns creates a problem for shipwreck survivor theories. Carers and other adults are in no position to correct their homesigning children’s use of words since the child is more expert in the language than the adults. And as the homesigner is completely deaf to others’ words, no one provides her with information about the use of words or their intentions regarding them. Unlike a hearing shipwreck survivor, there is no prospect of a profoundly deaf homesigner testing a hypothesis about someone else’s words. This suggests that the premise of shipwreck survivor theories is wrong: homesigners acquiring their first words are not in the mapping-meanings-onto-words business.

The Challenge

Are we forced to choose between shipwreck survivor theories and training theories? Or is there a better model?

Background: What Are Habitual Processes?

Habitual processes involve connections between stimuli and actions. For example, the presence of an empty glass (a stimulus) may be connected to the action of pouring. These connections are characterised by two features:

1. When the action is performed in the presence of the simulus, the connection between action and stimulus is strengthened (or ‘reinforced’) if the action is rewarded.

2. If the connection is strong enough, the presence of the stimulus will cause the action to occur.

This is another way of stating Thorndyke’s Law of Effect:

‘The presenta­tion of an effective [=rewarding] outcome following an action […] rein­forces a connection between the stimuli present when the action is per­formed and the action itself so that subsequent presentations of these stimuli elicit the […] action as a response’ (Dickinson, 1994, p. 48).

How do habitual processes differ from those involving belief, desire and intention? Two differences are important for our purposes:

1. The effects of habitual processes do not depend on what you currently desire. This is because the strength of the stimulus–action connection depends only on what was rewarding for you in the past, not what is rewarding for you now.

2. The effects of habitual processes do not depend on what you currently believe about which outcome the action will have. This is because the strength of the stimulus–action connection depends only on what outcomes the action had in the past, not on which outcomes it will have now.

Because habitual processes have these features, we can be sure that they are genuinely distinct from processes involving belief, desire and intention.

Glossary

References

Endnotes