Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T20:10:04.100Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Explanatory adequacy is not enough: Response to commentators on ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Ben Ambridge ,
Julian M. Pine  and
Elena V. M. Lieven
Ben Ambridge*
Affiliation:
University of Liverool and ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)
Julian M. Pine*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester and ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)
Elena V. M. Lieven*
Affiliation:
University of Liverool and ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)
*
Ambridge and Pine, University of Liverpool, Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, United Kingdom, [Ben.Ambridge@liverpool.ac.uk]
[Jpine@liverpool.ac.uk]
Lieven, University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences Coupland 1 Building Coupland Street, Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom [Elena.Lieven@manchester.ac.uk]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by means usually unspecified, to perceive her input in terms of high-level theoretical abstractions.

Keywords

binding principleschild language acquisitionfrequent framesparameter settingprosodic bootstrappingsemantic bootstrappingstructure dependencesubjacencysyntaxmorphosyntaxuniversal grammar

Information

Type
Perspectives
Information
Language , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. e116 - e126
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ambridge, Ben, and Goldberg, Adele. 2008. The island status of clausal complements: Evidence in favor of an information structure explanation. Cognitive Linguistics 19. 3. 349-81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, Ben, and Lieven, Elena V. Μ.. 2015. A constructivist account of child language acquisition. The handbook of language emergence, ed. by MacWhinney, Brian and O’Grady, William, 478–510. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, Ben, Pine, Julian Μ.; and Lieven, Elena V. Μ.. 2014. Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help. Language 90. 3.e53-e90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, Ben, Rowland, Caroline F., Theakston, Anna L.; and Tomasello, Michael. 2006. Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children's nonsubject wh-questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’. Journal of Child Language 33. 3. 519–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Batson, Gregg Thomas. 2012. The whether report: Reclassifying whether as a determiner. Reykjavik: University of Iceland B.A. thesis. Online: http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/11519/28517/1/The_Whether_Report.pdf.Google Scholar
Beekhuizen, Barend, Bod, Rens; and Verhagen, Arie. 2014. The linking problem is a special case of a general problem none of us has solved: Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven. Language 90. 3.e91-e96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behme, Christina. 2014. Focus on facts not fiction: Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven. Language 90. 3.e97-e106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boeckx, Cedric, and Hornstein, Norbert. 2003. The varying aims of linguistic theory. College Park: University of Maryland, College Park, ms.Google Scholar
Chang, Franklin, Dell, Gary S.; and Bock, J. Kathryn. 2006. Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review 113. 2. 234–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chien, Yu-Chin, and Wexler, Kenneth. 1990. Children's knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1. 225–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Beyond explanatory adequacy. (MIT occasional papers in linguistics 20.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas, and Levinson, Stephen C.. 2009. With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from universal grammar. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32. 5. 47292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitz, Hartmut, and Chang, Franklin. 2015. Learning auxiliary fronting with structured meaning. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, ms.Google Scholar
Foraker, Stephani, Regier, Terry, Khetarpal, Naveen, Perfors, Amy; and Tenenbaum, Joshua B.. 2009. Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. Cognitive Science 33. 2. 287–300.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Freudenthal, Daniel, Pine, Julian; and Gobet, Fernand. 2010. Explaining quantitative variation in the rate of optional infinitive errors across languages: A comparison of MOSAIC and the variational learning model. Journal of Child Language 37. 3. 643–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grodzinsky, Yosef, and Reinhart, Tanya. 1993. The innateness of binding and coreference. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 1. 69–101.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy; and Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69. 2. 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, Laurence B., Fey, Marc E., Deevy, Patricia; and Bredin-Oja, Shelly L.. 2015. Input sources of third person singular -s inconsistency in children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Child Language 42. 4. 786–820.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lin, Francis Y. 2015. What is really wrong with universal grammar (Commentary on Behme). Language 91. 2.e27-e30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazuka, Reiko. 1996. Can a grammatical parameter be set before the first word? Prosodic contributions to early setting of a grammatical parameter. Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, ed. by Morgan, James and Demuth, Katherine, 313–30. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
McCauley, Stewart M., and Christiansen, Morten H.. 2014. Reappraising lexical specificity in children's early syntactic combinations. Proceedings of the 36th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014), 1000–1005. Online: http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/179/.Google Scholar
Meylan, Stephan, Frank, Michael C.; and Levy, Roger. 2013. Modeling the development of determiner productivity in children's early speech. Proceedings of the 35th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013), 3032–37. Online: http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0542/.Google Scholar
Owen Van Horne, Amanda J., Hall, Jessica; and Curran, Maura. 2014. Development of interventions for language impairment: Why universal grammar may be harmful (Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven). Language 90. 3.e131-e143.Google Scholar
Pearl, Lisa. 2014. Evaluating learning-strategy components: Being fair (Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven). Language 90. 3.e107-e114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, Ana T., and Kahnemuyipour, Arsalan. 2014. News, somewhat exaggerated: Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven. Language 90. 3.e115-e125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfors, Amy, Tenenbaum, Joshua; and Regier, Terry. 2011. The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition 118. 3. 306–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pine, Julian M., Freudenthal, Daniel, Krajewski, Grzegorz; and Gobet, Fernand. 2013. Do young children have adult-like syntactic categories? Zipf's law and the case of the determiner. Cognition 127. 3. 345–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, Steven. 1984. Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven, and Bloom, Paul. 1990. Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13. 4. 707–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Carson T., Sprouse, Jon; and Caponigro, Ivano. 2015. Challenges for a theory of islands: A broader perspective on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven. Language 91. 2.e31-e39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soderstrom, Melanie. 2014. All hands on deck: In defense of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis and multiple theoretical approaches (Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven). Language 90. 3.e126-e130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprouse, Jon, Wagers, Matt; and Phillips, Colin. 2012. A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Language 88. 1. 82–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valían, Virginia, Solt, Stephanie; and Stewart, John. 2009. Abstract categories or limited-scope formulae? The case of children's determiners. Journal of Child Language 36. 4. 743–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Valin, Robert d. Jr. 2005. Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, Albert P. 1925. Linguistics and psychology. Language 1. 2. 52–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Charles. 2008. The great number crunch. Journal of Linguistics 44. 205–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Charles. 2013. Ontogeny and phylogeny of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110. 6324–27. Online: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/16/6324.full.Google ScholarPubMed