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phys.ufl.edu>MacWhinney, B. (Ed.). (1999). The Emergence of Language. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Mahwah, NJ. 500 pages. Reviewed by Dina Belyayeva Synopsis: This book is the first comprehensive collection of papers that promote an emergentist approach to language acquisition. Emergintism is a conceptual framework that does not explicitly reject either nativist or empiricist position but rather takes a step further from the current plateau of the nature-nurture debate by showing how language emerges from interactions between biological and environmental processes. The 16 chapters of the book were initially presented at the 28th Carnegie Mellon Symposium on Cognition, and offer contributions from a broad range of perspectives, such a connectionist, lexicalist, cognitive, functional and social-pragmatic. Overview and Critical Evaluation: The book is exceptionally well written which makes some highly specialized topics accessible to a much wider audience of linguists and psychologists interested in language acquisition issues. The first chapter (The Emergence of Language: A Conspiracy Theory -- Jeffrey L. Elman) offers an outline of a connectionist perspective on language developed by Elman and his colleagues in their 1996 book RETHINKING INNATENESS. Unlike nativism that defines innateness in terms of specific wiring at the level of representations, emergentism redefines innateness by offering a taxonomy of levels: representational, architectural and chronotopic (responsible for timing). An innate behavior, therefore, is a result of interactions between processes that modify environmental input at each of these levels. Elman uses computer simulations to demonstrate how non-domain-specific processing constraints result in domain-specific behavior. Although he purposefully draws all the attention to a single level (chronotopic), more elaboration on how levels interact (particularly Table 1.1.) is needed for readers to appreciate the proposed taxonomy. Elizabeth Bates and Judith C. Goodman (Chapter 2 - On the Emergence of Grammar from the Lexicon) take on the debate about domain-specificity of language by offering a unified lexicalist approach to grammar acquisition and processing. In this chapter they pursue two objectives: to demonstrate (1) that grammar and lexicon are acquired by the same mental-neural mechanisms, and (2) that these mechanisms are not unique to language. To support their position they offer a summary of longitudinal and cross-sectional data from normal children that reveals strong correlation between vocabulary size and grammar development. Their reevaluation of existing experimental and longitudinal studies dealing with atypical populations helps to rid of some stereotypes that were often used as evidence for grammar-specific neural wiring in the brain. A more moderate emergentist view on the role of the lexicon in grammar acquisition is offered by Adele E. Goldberg (Chapter 7 -- The Emergence of the Semantics of Argument Structure Constructions). According to this view, argument structure acquisition is an emergent property that derives from the processes of categorization and generalization of the meaningful input. Within this approach a particular role is assigned to light verbs that are characterized by more general semantics and greater accessibility in a wider variety of contexts. An interesting diachronic perspective on emergence of grammar is proposed in Chapter 3 (Generativity and Variation: The Notion 'Rule of Grammar' Revisited -- T. Givon). As a premise for the discussion Givon offers a review of philosophical antecedents to nativist and empiricist positions. A Cognitive- Adaptive Perspective that he later details takes an intermediate position that is more in line with the emergentist trend. A range of typological and variational data is presented to support for this middle-ground position. Some acronyms (pp 96-97) may be not familiar to a wider audience of readers and need to be explained. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer processing accounts that take into consideration statistical aspects of linguistic input. Chapter 4 (The Emergence of Grammaticality in Connectionist Networks - Joseph Allen & Mark S. Seidenberg) begins with a discussion of problems created by the competence-performance distinction adopted by the generative approach. According to this approach statistical aspects of linguistic input (e.g. impoverished input, negative evidence) are excluded as important factors in language learning. To demonstrate the contrary the authors chose the concept of grammaticality. A&S used a variant of a simple recurrent network to demonstrate that grammaticality judgments do not necessarily require access to principles of grammar, but may be based on statistical regularities of linguistic input. In Chapter 5 (Disambiguation and Grammar as Emergent Soft Constraints - Risto Miikkulainen & Marshall R. Mayberry, III) M&M present computer simulations to demonstrate how particular kinds of linguistics constraints (soft constraints) emerge from statistical regularities of word co-occurrence. Although their models successfully apply soft constraints by correlating new input with past contexts, it's not clear whether they will be able to resolve structural ambiguities that trigger garden-path processing. Maryellen C. MacDonald (Chapter 6 - Distributional Information in Language Comprehension, Production, and Acquisition: Three Puzzles and a Moral) uses analyses of verb modification ambiguity and heavy-NP shift to demonstrate how processing constraints emerge from distributional information that was made available to a speaker in prior comprehension and production events. The same system of emergent constraints is proposed to govern language acquisition. In conclusion she offers a review of studies that can develop this branch of language acquisition research. It is surprising though that she does not consider the Optimality Theory accounts as potential contributors to the field. Brian MacWhinney (Chapter 8 -The Emergence of Language from Embodiment) presents a unified theoretical framework of language organization and processing by using a cognitive ability of perspective-taking as a starting point for emergence of embodied meaning. Four perspectival systems (affordances; spatio-temporal reference frames; causal action chains; and social roles) are used as central organizing principles that provide common cognitive ground for many distinct language phenomena. MacWhinney outlines neurophysiological implications of the proposed hypothesis and clearly defines its limitations. Catherine E. Snow (Chapter 9 - Social Perspectives on the Emergence of Language) promotes a view according to which children's linguistics abilities emerge from interactions between children's social capacities and social- pragmatic conditions of their immediate environment. She introduces a new form of bootstrapping -- pragmatic precocity -- as the primary force that helps to take the language learning process off the ground. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 address issues of lexical acquisition and processing. The first chapter in the group (Children's Noun Learning: How General Learning Processes Make Specialized Learning Mechanisms - Linda B. Smith) presents results from a series of longitudinal studies that demonstrate how general mechanisms of associative and attentional learning create shape bias in learning of count noun terms. The conclusion that word learning emerges from general l eaning processes not special to language follows the "party line" of the emergentisit program outlined by Elman. The author, however, is not sufficiently explicit on the criteria that distinguishes between language-specific and general learning processes. The remark that attentional learning can be also achieved by non-linguistic perceptible cues, such as hand gestures, inadvertently entails that signing is a non-linguistic behavior. Chapter 11 (Emerging Cues for Early Word Learning - Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & George Hollich) proposes the developmental lexical framework that captures mechanisms of early word learning. The authors adopt a hybrid emergentist position that attempts to offer a common ground for various approached to word learning, such as the constraints-based, social-pragmatic and domain-general. The principles that were largely borrowed from the constraints-based literature are said to evolve from basic into more complex as children become more sophisticated in their abilities to weight a variety of cues. A new method (The Interactive Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm) is offered to illustrate how children learn to incorporate these principles. The method does not require cumbersome eye tracking equipment to measure duration of infants' attentional states. Yet, it is not clear how this paradigm can be implemented to register whether a child actually follows experimenter's gaze. As a model, the proposed hierarchy of principles lacks internal structure that could be used to define mechanisms responsible for transitions between and within tiers. William Merriman (Chapter 12 - Competition, Attention, and Young Children's Lexical Processing) presents a model of children's lexical processing (CALLED) that ties many loose ends existing in the literature. The model's centerpiece is a device that uses associations between various dimensions (features, functions, exemplars) and contextual cues (objects, scenes, events) to acquire and access words. Words' retrieval can be affected by learned attentional responses to words. Factors affecting attention include recency and frequency effects, distinctiveness of features, and social, pragmatic and linguistic cues. What makes this model particularly attractive is that its competition-attention component can be used to construe lexical principles (e.g. Shape Bias and Mutual Exclusivity) as emergent properties. It also offers a rule that can predict which principles are most prominent at different points of lexical development. The remaining chapters address issues of phonological development. In Chapter 13 (Statistical Learning in Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Domains - Richard N. Aslin, Jenny R. Saffran & Elissa L. Newport) preferential listening technique was used to demonstrate infants' sensitivity to phonotactic regularities of artificial languages. The obvious discord between the experimental findings suggesting that general learning mechanisms are employed in language learning and concluding remarks that take a rather sharp turn towards nativism creates a rather awkward impression. If the purpose of the paper were to demonstrate that "unconstrained learning mechanisms will not, by themselves, correctly learn just those things that every human baby learns" , than the study should have been designed in a way that could generate supporting evidence. Chapter 14 (The Emergence of Phonology from the Interplay of Speech Comprehension and Production: A Distributed Connectionist Approach -David C. Plaut and Christopher T. Kello) and Chapter 15 (The Emergence of Faithfulness - Joseph Paul Stemberger & Barbara Handford Bernhardt) address the issue of phonological development from two different perspectives - connectionist and Optimality Theory (OT). P&K present a computer stimulation of the framework that captures computational aspects of phonological processing as the basis or emergent phonological representations. The stimulation provides an impressive research tool by being able to demonstrate how a model can learn from variable input and use the extracted knowledge to gradually achieve the target production level. S&B present their variant of OT, according to which constraints that guide children's phonological development are not innate domain-specific processes, but rather emergent principles sensitive to communicative and Bilingualism are the major areas of my research interests. Other areas of interest include semantic memory disorders and models of language production and comprehension.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue