Kids Say the Darndest Things, in a Very Smart Way

Language and literacy disorders afflict 5 to 10 percent of Americans. Little is known about their cause and less about their treatment. Essential to advancing our knowledge about language disorders, as well as second-language learning, is understanding the development of normal language. Few parents ever forget the wonder they felt at their child's first word, that moment when a recognizable sound emerged from the seeming randomness of infant babbling. It's not long, however, before parents take for granted a child's to talk as just part of the natural way of things. (We assume quite wrongly that in children's interactions with adults we are teaching them!) Yet more than 52,000 publicly supported students in New York's schools are suffering from speech and language impairments. Precious little is known about the cause of such disorders, let alone truly effective ways of treating them. Real advances depend on understanding the development of normal language. Developmental psycholinguist Barbara Lust and her team of nearly two dozen undergraduate and graduate student researchers in the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies are hard at work figuring that out. the more than 15 years that Lust has supervised studies at the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory, she has found compelling evidence to confound the commonly held notion that children acquire speech by mimicking others. Quite the contrary, study after study supports the theory that infants are born with an innate competence, or biological programming if you will, for creatively constructing their mother tongue. Instead of copycats, infants are more like scientists who take data (spoken speech) and construct for themselves a theory of how the system of their own language works. Lust has found that by the age of three or so children have already created their own system of word meaning and sentence structure and of how the sounds of language work. a linguist's parlance, they've cracked the code of the semantics, syntax, and phonology of their native language - all before they can reliably use a toilet on their own. Everybody thinks children learn language just by copying it, but that's not true, Lust explains. In comparing the acquisition of more than 16 different languages, we have seen the power of the individual child's mind in creating the formal and highly complex grammatical system that linguists spend their careers puzzling over. Where professional linguists take years trying to figure out the rules and principles and parameters of language, children, infuriatingly, seem able to create the right theory for whatever language is around them - English, French, Japanese - within just three years. This realization that there must be some biological underpinning, what Lust calls universal grammar, drives the work in her lab. But because humans do not speak when they are newborns, she's seeking to determine precisely the role the environment plays as well. The numerous projects currently under way aim to answer questions such as * If there indeed is a language faculty present in the human brain at birth, how does it foster and constrain language development? * What abstract principles regarding language ability are children born with, and what is learned? * What rules and systems do children use to put words together (syntax)? Are these the same as those that adults use? * What processes and developmental points do children go through when learning their language? Are these the same across languages? * How much ambiguity in language do children understand and at what point? What is the cognitive computation that explains this knowledge? To study the acquisition of language per se (it is estimated that between 6,000 and 10,000 different languages are spoken in the world), Lust, who came to Cornell in 1976 as a visiting professor and became a full-time faculty member three years later, works with 10 graduate students, most of whom speak a second language in addition to English. …