Universal Grammar and Early Childhood Education: Towards a Synergy
摘要
In this chapter, we propose a conceptual framework that we believe creates points of interface between research in language acquisition and that in early childhood education (ECE) in preschools and schools. While generative theories of language acquisition have viewed the development of language in children as an interplay of nature and nurture, the latter’s significance has been more popular in the form of a triggering mechanism for the former to manifest. Rather the acquisition of language is an “acquisition + learning” process, whereby the input serves as the mechanism for the child’s application of innate knowledge of language. The extent of exposure to language-specific grammatical properties will depend on the frequency of use in a child’s environment, which may further depend upon a number of factors such as unambiguous communicative needs and socio-cultural norms of expression. Supported by empirical observations of Hindi child language data, we demonstrate that the grammatical “errors” in children’s language reveal instances of rules that children appear to master with high accuracy despite an impoverished input provided by limited experience at a very young age. On the other hand, the Bangla child language data demonstrates that there are language-specific rules that may not follow from the innate linguistic capacity, but follow a course of grammatical errors, at a relatively older age, that will potentially correct with increased contextual use. With a view to the findings that even though children are observed to not necessarily imitate adult language, we propose that a strengthened input in the environment at early education stages would benefit from an accessible understanding of the child’s innate grammatical knowledge.