Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (review)

What is the relation between language acquisition and cognitive development? The introduction and the nineteen papers in this volume provide a welcome overview of current research on this question, bringing together work from psychologists and linguists, with a strong emphasis on crosslinguistic approaches. There are two basic thematic lines in the volume: the origin and nature of the cognitive prerequisites for the acquisition of the meaning of linguistic elements, and the extent to which the semantic structure of the language being acquired has an effect on the process of acquisition and on cognitive development more generally.

The first question revolves around issues like innateness, domain-specificity, and modularity. Elizabeth Spelke and Sanna Tsivkin argue that initial knowledge in domains like space and number is modular and highly specific, and that conceptual development arises from a conjunction of these domains, perhaps with language as a unifying medium. The two papers by Linda Smith and Paul Bloom, by contrast, make a case against the domain-specificity of initial knowledge, adducing experimental evidence to show that it arises from general learning mechanisms and contextual cues, and that it is not specific to the task of language learning. Michael Tomasello goes beyond conceptual factors, showing on the basis of experiments that aspects of social cognition, like perceiving the intentions of interlocutors, are equally important in the task of word learning, an idea that also underlies Werner Deutsch, Angela Wagner, Renate Burchardt, Nina Schulz, and Jörg Nakath’s study on the influence of siblings and twins on the acquisition of reference. The problem of cognitive prerequisites is further explored in a paper by Patricia Brooks, Martin D. S. Braine, Gisela Jia, and Maria da Graca Dias on children’s typical errors in the interpretation of universal quantifiers, paired with a paper by Kenneth Drozd with an alternative explanation of the same type of error.

The question of the influence of language on conceptual development is broached in three rather programmatic papers: Jonas Langer uses comparative evidence from humans and nonhuman primates to conclude that ‘language lags behind’ (37) higher-order cognition, and Susan Carey shows that babies have basic number concepts before the onset of language acquisition, whereas Alison Gopnik uses crosslinguistic evidence to show that language does have an influence on cognitive development. A number of fascinating papers that compare the acquisition of languages with divergent semantic structures provide further evidence for the latter position. Dedre Gentner and Lera Boroditsky argue that those elements of language that tend to vary more crosslinguistically, like verbs and grammatical markers, tend to have more influence on cognitive development. Similarly, the four papers by Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi, Penelope Brown, Lourdes de León, and Heike Behrens all demonstrate how from a crosslinguistic perspective it is clear that language acquisition does not consist of learning labels for preexisting cognitive categories, but that such categories are shaped differently by the different semantic structures of languages, a process Dan Slobin in his paper calls ‘typological bootstrapping’ (441). Papers by Stephen C. Levinson and by John Lucy and Suzanne Gaskins also investigate how such cognitive differentiation has an effect on adult cognition. Eve Clark, finally, illustrates the other side of the same problem, by looking at categories that emerge in the process of acquisition but do not correspond to categories in the adult language.

For those who are interested in serious study of the relation between language and thought, this volume is required reading, especially those papers that deal with the crosslinguistic study of language acquisition.