Ep. 323: Acquiring Language: Tomasello vs. Chomsky (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: This is a Partial Examined Life Episode 323 Part 2. We've been talking about the work of Michael Tomasello as constructing a language, a usage based theory of language acquisition and his article Language is not an Instinct. I think there were two things, you know, we're going to get into more of his details of his theory of language acquisition and how this relates to pragmatics and also just I think we can still talk more about this overall difference in paradigm between the Chomsky and cognitive science Pinkarian point of view and what Tomasello is proposing because it does line up very well with the rationalists versus empiricists seemingly.

Even though Pinker certainly says, oh yeah, I'm referring to lots of studies, we of course care what the data says. Well, all these guys think that they're doing modern science. It may be. I don't know about Chomsky himself. Whether linguistics itself. It seems like it's kind of like mathematics in being this sort of geek oriented, self contained, like being. I'm so this is so cool the

1:12 Chris: way he's definitely not on as much of the empiricals. I think Pinker even mentions that Chomsky sort of put together this formalist account. And Pinker and some others are kind of the guys who go out and research and see if his claims are true. Because he's made several claims and given people things to experiment on. Like the famous example Chomsky gives is the forming of a question like in the. I guess in English something like, Jacob is happy today. And then you move the is to the front. Is Jacob happy today? You sort of move the auxiliary.

He claims that if you have a phrase that has a second auxiliary is, children will know which is to move to the front. So they won't need any testing to figure out which auxiliary is to move. They'll just naturally know which one. And so there have been experiments where they tried to capture this. Pinker talks about that a little bit. Where they have children encounter these phrases and see if they correctly move the auxiliary. And a lot of the empirical evidence shows that they correctly move it without needing to try it out first, get it wrong and then be corrected.

Mind you, Tomasello would say this doesn't necessarily mean that there's an innate explicit rule. It could just be there are, you know, cognitive.

2:23 Mark: Just the example. So Jacob, who is an idiot, is happy today. They would not say Jacob, who idiot is happy? Or something.

2:31 Chris: Right, right.

2:32 Wes: Page 14 is a good place for this in the book. It's the man who is Running example. Tomasello's point is that there are a lot of pragmatic and semantic reasons why children would not make that mistake. You don't need an abstract grammatical rule to know how to do that. You could just be motivated by the semantics of it or some other consideration. In other words, some of the errors that the Chomskyans say would be logical for children to make, but they don't make them are in fact really not all that logical.

3:01 Chris: Exactly.

3:02 Wes: When you get into concrete specific cases where there's semantics at stake and so on. And then, you know, Thomas pointed out, and also children actually are getting more feedback than the Chomskyans say they are. There isn't as much of a poverty of stimulus, blah, blah, blah, and that some of that is borne out. It seems to be borne out by the research, which is listed in great, you know, covered in great detail by the. By the Stanford article.

3:27 Seth: I wanted to just make a quick point about semantics versus syntax again where Tomasello says semantics, the ability to construct and communicate symbolically, he claims as a biological adaptation that appeared. Seems to have appeared about 200,000 years ago. And ultimately the whole biological imperative was to improve our ability as human beings to both to cooperate and to compete. But then he says that grammar that arises out of concrete semantic utterances and the use of symbols is a cultural and historical phenomenon and not biological. So he goes on and talks about the way in which infant capabilities are built.

But I thought that was really interesting, the idea that language is a biological adaptation for the purposes of cooperative and potentially competitive action. And then you start thinking about. We always think of human beings as defined as the thinking thing, the social animal, the political animal. What are all the different ways, the tool making animal, the tool using animal. The idea that we're the linguistic animals, another way of saying we're cooperative, which is another way of saying we're social. Right, but in a very particular kind of way.

And then the idea that syntax supervenes on top of basic semantic capabilities and categories is cultural historical, sort of explains the development of different languages, the way in which what would be common for human beings would be the ability to represent symbolically. And then what's cultural historical is the syntax, the linguistic, the specifics of the linguistic context or terms and rules that you actually use. Again inverting the notion that Chomsky was putting forward. But then there's a really interesting part on page 19 and after about what

5:21 Chris: that looks like on page 13 and 14, I think there's a nice kind of summary. He Tomasello summarizes one of the features of the account of grammar that on the case of the universal grammar case, the Chomsky and Pinker and folks that the fundamental grammatical categories relations underlying all of the world's languages come from a biological adaptation or set of adaptations in the form of a universal grammar. And then he says the alternative is a usage based view which there's no need to posit a specific genetic adaptation for grammar because processes of grammatical, grammaticalization and syntacticization can actually create grammatical structures out of concrete utterances.

So I just wanted to comment that I had never seen a word of grammaticalization, maybe even and syntacticization. I think that Tomasello is making the point that those things, those features of our language are created out of the activities of. Out of. And grammaticalizations Syntacticizations are cultural historical processes, not biological ones. The specific items and constructions of a given language are not invented all at once, but rather emerge, evolve and accumulate modifications over historical time as human beings use them with one another and adapt them to changing communicative circumstances.

6:42 Mark: Yeah, and the main reason it's cross language comparison. Tomasello says that the main argument why universal grammar does not actually help very much in analyzing these things that yes, you can give these very exact. I don't know how exact they are, but you could try to do the computer science thing to analyze the English language. But when you then look at the variety of. Tomasello admits, well, okay, noun and verb are probably universal, but those categories are just built in how we deal with the world. Actions versus stuff.

7:14 Chris: Right.

And you can have a functional theory for why those would have developed across languages. Yeah, same thing with pronouns. Pronouns are typically universal across languages, but there are obvious functional reasons as to why pronouns would be universal. Universal, yeah, exactly.

7:26 Mark: But yeah, other things like whether you actually indicate things by word order as we do in English or as. And Pinker talks about this all the time too. So I don't know if this is really a point of disagreement, but that you could just build it into the, you know, suffixes that I guess Latin had more suffixes for, you know, there's going to be an indirect object on this verb. There's going to be, you know, so you could just build in and Pinker talks about some particular Australian, I forget, Aboriginal language or something that, you know, the word order doesn't matter so much but it's like very 16 different kinds of suffixes go on everything.

So does it actually help then to say if you want to believe in a universal grammar anyway, you have to say, well, there's sort of a default. But then some languages twist the default and like, well, which one gets to be the default? It seems a little arbitrary. Does it actually save any processing time? Tomasello points out this linking problem between this universal grammar that's supposedly in the head and how does that actually relate to real languages? And that just creates a whole new processing question that, you know, he doesn't think has been answered.

8:27 Chris: Well, yeah, he calls it the sort of a two step hypothesis. And there's a kind of Occam's razor argument that Tomasello makes at certain points saying look, it's just simpler to talk about usage based.

Now you're positing an extra entity that doesn't do anything.

8:43 Wes: Well, you get a linking problem, right, if you have a very these very specific grammatical things that are built in, then you have to explain how the specific language morphology gets connected to those abstractions. So, you know, if you have that problem, then it seems like any, any attempt to solve that problem would already solve the problem of how we acquire grammar anyway. Right. So why hypothesize a universal grammar in the first place? If you just. If the same problem arises in relation to trying to get it to work.

9:12 Chris: And in addition to that, and I don't have any way to evaluate it, but Tomasello would point to that there are important exceptions or you have to sort of torture yourself to get universal grammar accounts to account for features of other languages. The world's languages have more variety in them than universal grammar will account for simply.

9:34 Mark: Right. And we should just bring our notions about philosophy of science to bear here. That it's not a simple question of Chomsky is out of date. And now this has been superseded by Tomasello's picture. It's that Chomsky has a paradigm here. And yes, you can always extend the paradigm to just make it have a more complicated account for these exceptions or whatever. But at some point maybe you just say, eh, let's just shift paradigms. It's just the other way is simpler. I don't feel in a good position to say what has actually been lost. Is there a whole computer sciencey, cognitive sciencey way of talking about these problems that is just now not on the table for Tomasello? And is that a bad thing? I don't know. We'd have to read something else.

10:14 Chris: Yeah, I mean like in terms of paradigm, I feel like for me, I think of it more generally in terms of Chomsky. I just think of him as bringing about the idea that we need to look at the cognitive aspect of language acquisition. His more explicit rule, universal grammar, of course has been kind of pushed back on and is. I totally get Tomasello and others sort of disagreement with it, its specificity, I guess. But I do think it's. We're still in the paradigm of the paradigm before this being a kind of behaviorist disposition towards language. So I don't know if it's Chomsky's. Even if we falsify Chomsky's specific universal grammar, the fact that we're. Tomasello is still talking about whatever cognitive constraints that are species wide but not language specific, it still feels like we're in that same cognitive paradigm, if that makes sense.

11:01 Wes: What do you mean same cognitive paradigm

11:04 Chris: that Chomsky's saying, like Dylan pointed out early, like look, there's something innate going on here. And Chomsky going to go well it's there, it's explicit rules of grammar. And other people are going well no, it's not explicit rules of grammar, it's just domain general aspects of our cognition, attention, reading pattern finding that lead to. But we're still talking about the fact that it's innate, the fact that we have innate capacities. It's just to what extent those are explicitly language oriented or just. Yeah, and so like we're still in there in that paradigm. But I mean, I don't know, maybe that's how I think about it. Maybe other people would think about it

11:35 Wes: more specifically, which is, you know, what's innate is very different. Obviously, as you point out, one's more general. And then as Tomasello puts it, usage based theories, basically the innate thing is the symbolic dimension, not the grammatical dimension. So usage based theories hold that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, with grammar being derivative. Grammar is not innate, it's derivative of capacities which are innate. It can be, it can be constructed historically from use and children can reconstruct for themselves ontogenetically.

12:08 Mark: Did you guys see your decisions about these things as dependent on the validity of experimental evidence? That we are in no position to judge either way. I was very convinced by Tomasello saying things like part of the reason why Chomsky thought that there was a special language gene, there's a special language area, is because of brain studies that you can have people that he cites, people who seem to have a lot of language facility but have no intelligence, you know, or idiot savant language savants or the other way around, that they have general intelligence.

In other words, they have this attentional stuff, all the stuff that Tomasello would be talking about, but yet they can't actually form syntax. And so that pointed to at least physiologically there being a single thing. And Tomasello is saying, well actually the data on that are not so good. If you actually look at those people who seem to be, you know, linguistic savants, even though they're severely retarded, then actually they are just speaking according to the mental age that their general intelligence would match to. Right.

13:15 Wes: The Stanford also goes into great detail on this stuff, way more detail than Tomasello. Seems pretty definitive that this is just bad, these are badly reported. If you look at the actual data, then it doesn't really support the universal grammar thing. And then brain localization, that doesn't matter if it's localized in the brain, that doesn't mean it's Innate?

13:33 Mark: Yeah, that's what I was going to

13:34 Chris: say is it could be that there's some elements or parts in the brain that are language specific or help us use syntax. And if they're. It's called Broca's aphasia. Sometimes where there are certain parts of the brain that can be injured, it can affect people's ability to engage in complex syntax. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's innate to the brain. It could be just as Tomasello was saying that it sort of developed and grammar falls out of and you injure that part of the brain, and so you struggle with syntax. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the structure is innate or something. It could have been developed and stuff.

Same thing's true for all kinds of physical activities. Right. Mark, you asked if we somehow, like in the experience of doing this and reading this, we're convinced by the evidence, so to speak. And I had never read any of Chomsky, or I hadn't read Pinker at all on language or anything like that. And I started with the Stanford Review because I thought, well, I'll just get an overview of stuff. And when I read the Skinner summary, that's in here where this is. Well, Skinner argued. Now, language is really just a matter of certain behavior dispositions. My immediate reaction, which I noted, was seems deeply stupid. Okay, so that was my first reaction there.

I agree.

14:48 Wes: Chomsky's reputation. He made his reputation by saying just that.

14:52 Chris: Okay, yeah. But then when I got to the summary of Chomsky, I was like, well, how is this different from learning to walk or from running, from throwing, from eating or breathing or peeing? And then I felt like he had an impoverished understanding of the emergence and the kinds of powers required for the emergence of language. So my point about that is that I gave it completely predisposed, actually, to agree with Tomasello, because I believe in emergence, and I don't know what that says. I think that I found myself just immediately doubting universal grammar from the beginning, just by the basic ways it was described, because it seemed to deeply underestimate what the kinds of powers we have as capabilities and what the outco of powers can be and what content can emerge out of power.

So I don't know what that says about me, but I basically was convinced by Tomasello before I even read Tomasello.

15:49 Seth: Yeah, that's an interesting point, Dylan. I don't want to say I had a similar kind of experience. I mean, I think the representation of Chomsky's position in the Stanford piece. It's a very well written summary. And I didn't have the same sense that you did, but also I understood how there's a number of points at which it's saying, you know, he's just pointing to a question. He's essentially raising a question, saying that this explanation that has been assumed or has been provided or is the standard can't be all that there is. And the evidence points towards there being some kind of an answer that's in this area of innateness.

Right. But Chomsky doesn't commit to what that would actually look like or what the. What innateness is there in that context. And then the whole universal grammar thing, I definitely got the sense it was like, okay, so we just then kicked off some kind of research paradigm for the next 40 years where people were trying. It's just like, well, what could the universal grammar be? What does it look like? What sort of characteristics could it have? And Tomasello is coming back, and that research paradigm is probably more abstract, you know, mathematical, what have you.

And Tomasello is bringing it back to, well, I'm. I'm going to take more of an experimental approach. And if you read through Tomasello's book, like, 60% of the references he makes are to Tomasello, it's clear that he's got a research paradigm that he's tracking that obviously not a lot of other people have been doing, because there's not a lot of. He's got a couple of other people that he's done some research with, but he's really. And he has that one in the video that you mentioned, Wes, that you shared, he did a whole paper just on his daughter when she was nine months old or something like that.

You know, in the same way that there are things that I find provocative and interesting about the Chomskyan thesis. You're right. It's almost like behavioralism has always been a straw man to some extent. What Tomasello is doing here is saying, I think, again, like, hey, here's an explanation for how you could talk about language acquisition and language development without having to pull in the notion of a universal grammar. I can give you a perfectly good explanation that doesn't do that. And I'm now constructing a bunch of studies to kind of validate my point.

But there's. In numerous places, he says there's just not enough research on this piece or that piece, or there's not enough research on this. So really, I think what we have here is he's much more focused on biological evolution, language Acquisition, language development, and an empirical approach to looking at these things. And Chomsky was not. And so the question is, you know, from our perspective as philosophers, it's. I find again, that thesis that the idea that language is a biological adaptation for cooperative action is really, really interesting.

And what does that tell us about the nature of symbolism and symbolic language? And when I talk about, we've talked about this in one of the last nightcaps about how I feel about symbolic language having the potential, this inherent potential for violence. This is like totally my wheelhouse right now. The question is, is this guy setting up a new paradigm of research where now people are going to go off and try to figure out, is it at 9 months or 10 months that such and such a. When does speech units allow you to start detecting intention, et cetera, et cetera?

You know that kind of.

19:07 Wes: Well, Chris, do you know the status of the field? I mean, the Stanford articles seem pretty. Tomasello biased in favor of Tomasello.

19:14 Chris: Just.

19:15 Wes: I don't know if that's coincidental or if the philosophers of language tend to.

19:19 Chris: There's three camps for sure. Chomsky's camp is, honestly, more I could call the Pinker's camp because he's kind of moved away from Chomsky. In some sense they differ in the way they think language evolves pretty heavily. But yeah, I would say there's the universal or innate grammar sense, and then there's Tomasello's all the way on the other end, which is usage based. And in the middle of that there's a statistical learning.

The connectionist one is that.

Yeah, the connectionist one is the one that's kind of, I want to say, almost in the middle, where it thinks that there are constraints. Some of the very, very, very general ones are language specific, but they sort of gradually develop. But they think that mostly kids can. And this is because certain algorithms and computer computational models were developed in like the 80s and 90s that showed with just a little bit of information or phrases or linguistic data, they can kind of abstract general grammar rules pretty easily. And so they think, well, kids can probably do this too, and that. So that led to that disposition. But they're not, if I recall correctly, I don't think that they believe grammar entirely emerges out of symbols. They think that it's a mixed bag or there, there might be some very, very general universal language specific cognitive constraints.

20:32 Wes: So we can't say there's a dominant theory right now. I did quite a bit of research trying to find Chomsky to see if anyone was defending themselves against Tomasello, responding to Tomasello, and I couldn't find anything. I couldn't find any.

20:47 Chris: Yeah, Tomasello's stuff is definitely not the dominant view. I would say connectionist, that's kind of the. But I mean, like, yeah, people have moved very far away from Chomsky, I think. And so I'd say it's kind of a mixed bag. I mean, there's reasons to think, to paint the picture a little bit why Chomsky and them might take it serious when they look at something like linguistic universals. Tomasello is pretty dismissive of them. And while it is the case that of the 6,000 languages in the world, there are very few universals, like we said, probably just the separation of verbs, nouns, and then pronouns.

I think those are the only three I can think of that work. And those all have functional explanations. So there's no reason to think. But there are other things that Chomsky and Pinker and those people like certain transformations like we talked about. The auxiliary is turning something into a question. There are trends across languages that seem too common and in a sense, arbitrary. Mind you, Tomasello is going to point out that they're not arbitrary and there is a way we can describe them in a functional way. But it didn't look like they had any serious function.

So it would be kind of like all civilizations deciding on the right side of the road to drive and just looking across the world and going, wow, like 90% of countries drive on this side. And so you might think like, well, there must be some universal innate reason why we made this sort of, in a sense, arbitrary choice. And so they started. That's one of the reasons they might postulate, like, there's a universal constraint, a universal grammar. Again, Tomasello would say, like splitting up nouns and verbs into phrases and then taking them as whole units and things like that is.

Does have a functional use. But yeah, I just don't think they had enough research into that back in Chomsky's day. So it did look like you had these various disparate languages across the world that shared in certain seemingly arbitrary rules when it comes to transforming sentences. And so they. They would point to that as like, look, why did they share all these? In fact, Hilary Putnam wrote an article responding to Chomsky about that, saying that talking about what I think it's called an UR language, whatever that you are, people talk about, like the origin language.

So he talked a little bit about how some people think a lot of languages share these commonalities across the world. Because they all share an original language. And that would be the reason that. And so it's not necessarily an innate universal grammar, but just they have the same origin because we were all one species at one point, things like that. So yeah, that kind of vibe. So linguistic universals is one of the reasons that I think it might look to someone like there's a universal grammar. We didn't talk about pidgins or creole languages, but that's another thing that I think is really highlights the universal disposition.

23:25 Mark: Yeah. Do you want to give that example? Because that's another alleged, here's alleged proof that something like universal grammar is true. And I remember Pinker lays this out pretty clearly. So it's that a pidgin language does not have a full grammar. It's like you get a bunch of workers. I'm in Hawaii and I've got my Chinese workers and I've got workers from other local workers and they don't all speak the same language, but they have to communicate just enough. So it's like Wittgenstein's, you know, simplified language games of slab. That's what a pidgin language is, is like slab.

Because they have to just. And so there are children allegedly that grow up and are exposed pretty much just to these pidgin languages, but yet they come up, that community of children with a full on language, with a full on grammar. That's what a creole is, is a full language that emerges out of pidgins. It's their brain is kicking in and it's giving this grammar where there was none before. And the response that Tomasello gives is, well, but they were probably, they weren't just hearing the pidgin, they were hearing, you know, their parents speaking their native language in their full time.

You know, so somehow, yes, they're adding some things from the pidgin language to it, but like they're getting their full linguistic thing. Like he just does not find it convincing that this is a proof at all.

24:46 Chris: Yeah, I mean, like, I think it's a better example is the sign language that's developed in Nicaragua, I believe just because deaf children kind of can serve as a better example because they don't, like you said, the people, the children in Hawaii, that example is they could have been spoken to by their parents with their original languages, which could account for why they added grammar to pidgin to seeming Creek Creole. But the Nicaraguan case is where you have a bunch of deaf children that were essentially isolated until the government was united, the Sandinistas and they started developing schools for the Deaf.

And then in these schools, children were taught to lip read. They were not taught sign language because there was that kind of discriminatory effect where they wanted them to be able to participate in normal society. So they thought the best thing to do is to teach them these aspects of lip reading and intention reading and things like that. And so what ends up happening is these kids grow up and they kind of on the playgrounds and school buses created their own little sort of pidgin sign language. So it's lacking in syntax, highly gestural, and they kind of develop their own hodgepodge, rudimentary communication system.

And then the children of those who developed what I think is called the lsn, I want to say, is the one that's just kind of pidgin. They had children and then those children sort of developed their own sign language, but they seemingly added grammar similar to the pidgin creole story, but they didn't have access to hearing the original language of their deaf parents. Their deaf parents just have the sort of pidgin signing. That's an interesting case that's more recent that Pinker will point to as well. Well, it could be that I think I've read that there have been studies on this that show that the kids had access to readings, certain Spanish dictionaries and other readings that could have helped them develop this grammar, which was, you know, that I think Tomasello at one point talks about that in a paper where, well, the kids had access to enormous amounts of reading.

And then there's arguments over whether reading can contribute to someone developing grammar and things like that. But either way, the point of the pidgin and creole language is that if it's true that they don't have access to enough data to develop grammar and they are just adding these grammatical structures to their language to develop a full blown language that would highlight and sort of point to the idea that there's some sort of universal grammar, according to Pinker. But you know, when I think about it, I mean, Tomasello could just say, like, all it points to is that I'm right, that there are cognitive elements that are still just domain general that contribute to like intention reading and all this stuff could still have a grammar emerge out of those things while they're developing and learning this pidgin language, if that makes sense the way it's put

27:23 Wes: in the Stanford article. So the author of the Stanford article quotes a review by Newport of the data that basically suggests that Pinker is obscuring or downplaying a lot of things, but ultimately Some of it is just not as reported. But then ultimately, as you're pointing out, this is the way she puts it. She agrees that this result could be due to constraints imposed by an innate language faculty, but argues that it is also consistent with the existence of some more generalized propensity in children to generate systematic rules from noisy inputs, rightly pointing out that the latter hypothesis cannot be ruled out in advance of empirical test.

28:00 Seth: Right.

28:01 Chris: So Tomasello's points all still work under this sort of idea of like developing a creole language. He would just be like, it's not language specific.

28:09 Wes: And this whole Stanford article is debunking a lot of these universal grammar arguments, and often without any reference to Tomasello. Just with a reference to the most

28:18 Chris: recent review or the meta studies on stuff that.

28:21 Wes: Yeah. So the stuff that Tomasello, I just wanted to point that out because he gave some very brief arguments in general, I think, against. But the Stanford article is pretty systematic and convincing.

28:31 Chris: Yeah. And I think that the pidgin creole language really is just a good way to highlight the disagreement or what's at stake, because it kind of like sets

28:39 Seth: the stage and an easy way to understand.

28:42 Chris: To me, it speaks to why someone like Pinker or someone like Chomsky might say, hey, what's going on here? There's got to be something. Again, I think they go too far by saying it's explicit and they're grammar rules and they're language specific. I think that that's. Yeah, pretty much the consensus nowadays.

28:57 Wes: And the truth, of course, could be somewhere in between Chomsky and Tomasello. And if it is, it'll be extraordinarily difficult to figure out, to parse through all that.

29:08 Seth: Yeah.

29:08 Wes: Like empirically, it's going to be, you know, I think the implication is empirically it's hard to. It'll be hard to settle the question, but it'll be even harder if it turns out to be somewhere in between the two.

29:18 Chris: Well, and I mean, one of the reasons why it's super hard is getting down to what do you mean to say that something. That some content or something emerges out of something else. Even the articulation of what it means to actually have something emerge out of something else, where that. That whole is genuinely greater than the content of its parts. That's a framework for understanding something. But it's still. I think there isn't a nail in the coffin of structuralist understandings where you say, well, you can't have things emerge. Basically, you're back to the, well, how do you learn anything?

Well, you must have already known it in some way or another. And then you're bringing it into your own activity is just a specification of something you could already do as opposed to in terms of strong content. That's what the myth of recollection in part is. But the other possibility is that there are deep, much more fundamental potentials out of which that content arises. And that's what Tomasello's argument is, and that's what an emergence argument is. Some of it gets to proving the absence of something. That's why Tomasello will make the argument, well, look, it's just a simpler account.

So he goes to a theoretical account, say, look, part of what we're trying to do is theoretically account for how language is acquired, where its origins are and what the fundamental aspects of it. And he says part of his argument, which is the way these things go, is that, look, my theoretical argument is a simpler one in the sense of requiring less specific ad hoc attributes. He's saying Chomsky and Pinker are like Ptolemy. Ptolemy requires that there are fixed orbits that all of the planets work on that are part of this crystalline structure of the world.

And Kepler's going to say, you know what, it's just the individual planets have their own powers and out of that arise the organizations of the stars. That's the way it works.

31:16 Wes: I think part of what will help settle it is the continued research obviously into how infants are actually, yes, acquiring language. And there are some things. So for instance, Tomasello is claiming that infants are picking up holophrases and bigger chunks of language that they then can gradually sort of analyze into the component parts in parallel to the way they're analyzing the functional components of intentional behaviors by others to which those linguistic components correspond, and that they're, for instance, using quote unquote, usage based constructions where, where, for instance, they know that, for instance, you can use a certain preposition with a certain verb in a certain semantic context.

And. But that's not generalized at all. They just know that, you know, they know it on a word by word basis or a phrase by phrase basis. And then eventually they can build that out because they'll have various usage based constructions, it'll have commonalities between them, and that'll build itself out into something that's more general and looks grammatical like Chomsky. So I, I guess there is, maybe I'm contradicting myself, but I guess there is some promise in this research project of really observing children and how they learn language. Are they really just imbibing these bigger phrases and then analyzing them or is there a more analytical thing going on from the very beginning?

It seems like you could. Research could really help with that. And it seems like. I wouldn't say it's. I don't know if it's just getting started. I. I get the feeling that it is kind of. The research on this is kind of in its infancy.

32:52 Chris: I think it's very exciting right now. Yeah, it's still.

32:54 Wes: Yeah.

32:55 Mark: Can I read the definition on page 36 for holo phrase? So it's H O L O phrase, like a hologram. Not like a phrase that is hollow and waiting for something to fit into it. That sounds like. That sounds exactly the opposite. A early one word utterances that convey a holistic, undifferentiated communicative intention. Most often the same communicative intention is that of the adult expressions from which they were learned. So frozen phrases, these I want to do something. Things where you don't necessarily know the child is using it as a whole expression but doesn't know the component parts.

Like even if it has multiple words in it, it doesn't know that wanna do it breaks down into wanna. And you can apply wanna to other things. I don't know if that's a great example because it seems kids figure that one out. But there are other. These frozen phrases. Let me see. Yeah, I want to do it. There you go. Those are the examples he gives. They're not actually syntactic. Even though they have multiple words, they

33:55 Wes: become that they, you know, they get through pattern recognition and analysis. And that seems plausible. That to me is a very plausible explanation of how you could get grammar out of language. It really does all start with shared intention and understanding that the goal directed behavior of other people. People. And then being able to break that down and then being able to symbolize and break the symbolic system down.

34:16 Chris: But anyway, well, that's part of the story, right? It's not just the intention, but also these experiments you're talking about are revealing that the actual sort of underlying capabilities that we have even as children are much more sophisticated. Right. The level of pattern recognition, for instance. I thought it was the experiments they've done with the strings of nonsense words in which the individual components of the word. So, you know, it's a really good point to remember that kids are experiencing language just orally. So that it's just a string of sounds coming in and out of various intonations and stuff like that.

And their ability to be able to chunk that out even though there's no syntactical content to it. Right. But that pattern recognition and then the feature which was related to the holophrases of just chunking things in general in much larger pieces for meaning. So you get communicative meaning out of those larger pieces that then later on get broken apart. Right. Or they, you know, again, showing that the main goal is carrying the meaning with them as opposed to carrying the syntactic structure with them.

35:30 Seth: What you're talking about, Dylan, the ability to identify what constitutes a speech unit. And they say, you know, this is something that even before infants comprehend or produce language, it seems like they understand concepts, speech units and associations. That in itself is. That's fascinating, like, because it's just saying, you know, infants don't know that communication is even taking place initially. There's a point at which it goes from just the pure interplay of phonemes and so forth to an understanding that something is intended, something's trying to be accomplished with those things.

36:08 Mark: I don't know that we really made clear. You know, the thing that made Chomsky in the first place, say there has to be this universal grammar, is just how suddenly infants seem to learn language that they just don't know language. Don't know language. Whoa. You know language. You know it in very sophisticated way. And that seemed to indicate that, like, it's more like a switch going on than the gradual accumulation of some skills. That is the case in so many other domains. Right. You don't just go from being an amazing bike rider from zero. There's at least a ramp up. Although either you're riding it or you're not. So maybe there's something.

36:41 Wes: There is a switch. For Tomasello, it's like the shared attention thing. Eight to 12 months is just a switch. And it's pretty amazing.

36:48 Seth: Yeah.

36:48 Chris: And he points to that as some of the reason you might think that he looks to. Okay, when do kids start having this explosion and understanding of words, language. And he looks to what other skills are developing around that time, like Wes said that intention reading and all that stuff, that's when it sort of comes online. Gesturing, the looking to the face and

then articulating the ramp up. Right. So understanding that while there actually is a process that's happening, it's not actually a switch. It might come on fast, but there is a real progression. That's again, what these experiments are looking at. What is the progression of ability that's happening along the way? It's true. There is the. You can ride a bike. You can't ride a bike. But if you Taught a kid how to ride a bike, or you think back about learning other skills. There is a kind of in between, right. Where you do have your first success of going a certain number of feet or looking at the acquisition of learning to walk. Yeah, there's the first steps that happen, but it really is a progression. You don't go walking and then all of a sudden you're successfully running 100 yard dash at 10 seconds.

37:49 Wes: It does take years to reach an adult level competency, something Tomasello points out over and over again that I think we forget.

37:55 Mark: And I think that's what the holophrase is. The whole point of that is it seems like instantly the child is doing something complex. But no, actually it's a pretty simple thing. And they only get the complex grammar later as they're figuring out more things.

38:09 Wes: It's symbolically complex, but not grammatically complex. Yeah, right.

38:12 Chris: And if you have Chomsky's disposition, who thinks that because he thinks there's universal grammar, he thinks that even when children are using early forms of language, they're already mastering language, period. Because he thinks it's just a single entity. Whereas Tomasello thinks that children using language and adult mastery of language are further apart than Chomsky does. And so there's going to be a progression. Whereas Chomsky thinks that you've already got all the rules set up. So early children using language, they're using the full blown language already. And so Tomasello doesn't think that that's the case.

38:44 Seth: It does seem to be an issue for Chomsky to describe development of language acquisition. Or at least I won't say it's a problem for Chomsky. I'll say it's an open question for the Chomskyites to explain how language acquisition could possibly differ developmentally. And there was a point at which there was just kind of like this offhand thing. I think it was in the innateness in language. And we're talking about the universal grammar having to come up with like a testing model of acquisition. So if the, the behavioralist thing is a training model of acquisition or repetition or some sort of rote type, the universal grammar would require is that children somehow have this rule and then they test an utterance.

You know, they have a set of rules, the universal grammar, and they test utterances against those rules, perhaps, oddly enough, maybe for how it sounds or how other people react to it. But there would have to be some way in which you would account. And then that in itself means you have to kind of Prove that that's actually how children learn. And I thought that was one of Tomasello's points. It's like, children do not set up language hypotheses and test utterances against language hypotheses. That's not how it works.

40:02 Chris: Just have this image of these like one year olds in. In lab coats or something like that.

40:08 Seth: Yeah.

40:08 Wes: Hey, guys, let's figure this out.

40:11 Chris: It's like one of those baby movies, right?

40:13 Mark: The little linguists, as one of the readings puts it.

40:17 Wes: What are the noises these adults are making? What's going on?

40:20 Chris: What do you think's going on? What do you. What could possibly be happening?

40:25 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I like all this talk of how they hear something and how do they come up with a theory, you know, of what's being said and how do they narrow down and do they consider all the crazy, you know, if a computer had to come up with a theory of like, all right, I heard the word one. Is that going to be the subject of the sentence? Is that going to be an adjective? You know, it would have to come up with just a huge array of things. Whereas a child probably has more heuristics that they can just make a guess. It's usually the number or whatever. Because when you're talking to children, you're not. One must not eat with one's hands. You know, you're probably not in. There are ways of showing that they've mastered the grammar that involve more guessing. Like stochastic. Is that the reasoning?

41:13 Wes: The heuristic reasoning, distributional analysis as well?

41:18 Seth: Yeah, well, and, you know, we really haven't even gotten to sort of more of the details about the framing that Tomasello talks about with the joint attention. The ability to read intentions, you know, role reversal, social referencing. But there is definitely, he says, there's no doubt that there's a certain amount of statistical capability that we have to have innately to be able to do this. You have to be able to focus your attention. You have to have some pattern finding capabilities, all of which are. He's just trying to stitch together this, you know, sort of view of how 6, 8, 9, 10 different distinct capabilities, whether they be innate or things that we develop, can come together and give an explanation for how language can be acquired.

42:03 Wes: Maybe we can say something, Seth, about role reversal, imitation. I know we're running out of time, but I had mentioned it briefly before, but this is around somewhere after page 25, before 28. Part of what drives cultural learning, or essential to cultural learning, is understanding others as intentional agents. You understand what the goal of the other, you know, say your child and you see an adult, you understand what the adult is trying to do. And then you imitate the adult when you have the same goal. But you know, as I mentioned before experimentally, if the action has failed to achieve the end result, a child can reproduce it just as effectively.

They're not mimicking the actual behavior, they're sort of re engineering the behavior. All you need is a hint. You had a goal, you tried to do this. They'll reproduce the thing you were trying to do, not the failed thing that you did. And then on top of that, symbolic communication adds a new layer. Because what the child is doing with symbolic communication, they can't just substitute themselves for the adult in a goal directed activity. Because with a symbol, an adult is expressing an attention towards the child's attentional state rather than just towards a third object, you know, something they're trying to do.

So when the symbol is adopted from the child's perspective, it's not going to be self directed in the same way. They don't just carry in the symbols, you know, oh, I'm trying to affect my, my own attentional state, they reverse that. So they use it towards the adult in the way it was used towards them. They substitute themselves for the adult as the actor and then the adult for themselves as targets. So they can make that imaginative switch. And that is what a linguistic symbol is at a certain point. Tomasello calls this, he kind of adopts Saussure's phrase bi directionality of the sign, I think.

So the symbol is always understood from both sides of the interaction. I think that's really crucial is that you're always in the other person's head and your own head at the same time in this kind of hall of mirrors thing. And that by itself is just the crazy cognitive accomplishment before you even get to language use.

44:23 Seth: Absolutely. It's crazy. And it happens at one year old universally across all normal children and doesn't happen in primates. That's his point. It's this crazy astounding thing happens just like that.

44:36 Chris: Well, and there are people that, there are humans that lack it. Right. Or struggle with it. And so there's another sign of, you know, it's a capability within human beings as a species that just like other kinds of deficiencies with respect to their general species wide capabilities that you can seek instances where, where it's lacking, which is part of understanding that it exists.

45:00 Seth: Yeah.

45:00 Mark: Tomasello says that autistics are not able to do that with intention which really confused me.

45:07 Chris: Because they struggle with intention.

45:09 Mark: Yeah, because. Because of course, there's so many different degrees and types of autism and some of them are very, very verbal. And yet the fact that they don't seem to be able very good at reading others intentions does not affect their verbosity. So I don't, I don't know how to understand that.

45:25 Seth: Another area that requires more study. I believe one of the things that

45:30 Mark: really blew my mind here related to this role reversal thing is the fact that in sign language, the you and me used as. Even though it involves sort of pointing, it's different than actually just gesturing at somebody that children very naturally. I remember, you know, we used to always to my son, like, do you want us to pick you up? Pick you up? And so he would start saying pick you up, pick you up when he wanted to be picked up until he figured out indexicals that, you know, he should say, me and children learning sign language do the same thing. That they say it wrong even though they pick you up and they're pointing outward when you'd think no, the gesture should be pointing at themselves. They should, they should get that at least fast. But they have the same issue.

46:11 Wes: Interesting.

46:12 Chris: Well, it's a full blown syntax rather than just gestures. It shows that sign language is actually a language and not just advanced gesturing or something like that.

46:20 Seth: Yeah, that's crazy. Interesting.

46:23 Mark: All right, well, let's wrap this up. Thanks, Chris, for joining us for this.

46:28 Wes: Yeah, thank you, Chris.

46:30 Seth: Yeah.

46:31 Mark: Next time we're going to do Plato's Cratylus, his dialogue about language, so we can get some more of this fundamental stuff and then maybe we'll keep going on a bit of language stuff. Before we get back to Kierkegaard. Sorry, folks, that were holding the breath. Folks should let us know what they want us to cover. Email us@peltiallyexaminedlife.com or make a comment on the blog post associated with this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com you can also reach out to us through Twitter or Instagram. Can I say, should I have to say X now? I will never say X through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Thanks everybody and good night.

47:09 Chris: Good night.

47:10 Seth: Good night.

47:10 Chris: Good night.

47:10 Wes: Good night.