Contending perspectives

Some oppositions

The biolinguistic perspective adopted here has many critics. Some critics address what they see as gaps or explanatory failures. Others appeal to the principle of verification by experience, and reject the mathematical reasoning which arose in response to the work of Bertrand Russel and Gottlieb Frege. Especially in the English-speaking world, this has led to what seems to me like an excessive concern with methodology and a correspondingly cavalier approach to theory.

Behaviorism

Burrhus Skinner (1957) proposed that language was ‘verbal behaviour’ and could be reduced to exchanges between individuals. He later told how he was motivated in the 20 year task of writing Verbal Behavior by a challenge from the English philosopher, Alfred Whitehead: Could behaviourism account for one of them saying “No black scorpion is falling on this table.” Whitehead’s point critically involved the quantifier no. How, he implicitly asked Skinner, could quantification, as by words like some, all and no, be reduced to the terms of a conversation? Skinner seems to have thought that he had responded to Whitehead’s challenge. In 1959 Chomsky reviewed Verbal Behavior for the New York Times, exposing irremediable flaws in Skinner’s claims.

The problem of planning

Milder forms of empiricism live on in some investigations of conversation and a theory of speech disorder, known as ‘Childhood Apraxia of Speech’, CAS. Both the investigation of conversation and CAS involve the notion of planning, in the one case, planning the utterance, and in the other planning its pronunciation. But the notion of planning is not clearly defined by either of these approaches.

Oral Motor Therapy and discrimination training

From two perspectives, there are abilities which are obviously essential for speech, the coordination of the articulators and the auditory processing of what is heard, by memory and discrimination. The focus on articulators is particularly emphasised by ‘Oral Motor Therapy’, OMT. It appears to stem largely from the work of 19th century elocutionists. It has been largely discredited by Greg Lof (2006). Similarly there are programs which claim to sharpen the auditory discrimination of speech in particular, by contrasting speech with classical music. Both are of these approaches are peripheral in the sense that neither involves the central relation between sound and meaning. Both are defended by their proponents on the basis of what they claim to be their positive experiences or testimonials. But these are not backed up by evidence connecting the practices with any measurable effect.

Radical sociology

By an idea due particularly to Michael Tomasello (2003, 2010), which I shall refer to here as ‘radical sociology’ , speech and language are inseparably embedded into human society. Disregarding any structures mediated only by grammar and meanings, there are just reactions and interpretations between individuals. Radical sociology shifts the research focus to methodologies for establishing what these reactions and interpretations are, and sees the search for uniformity as misguided. There is just infinite variation, defined either on individuals or on social groups defined by class, locality, gender, ethnicity, age. It is not obvious to me how such a research focus bears on children’s speech and language problems.

What the National Curriculum leaves out

From another perspective, there are the exigences of everyday teaching. The English National Curriculum strings together reading, writing, understanding and speech as four irreducible components of what needs to be taught in school. But this leaves out dreaming, imagination, the actor’s mental rehearsal before going on stage, and more. And grammar is reduced to operations such as the positioning of adverbs in sentences.

Linguistic critiques

From a series of linguistic perspectives, such as those of Maurice Gross (1979), Robin Dixon (1997), Ray Jackendoff (2002), William Croft (2002, 2004, 2010), Ben Ambridge (2004, 2010), Eva Dobroska (2015), biolinguistics should be rejected out of hand. There are six main thrusts to their criticisms, each vulnerable to counter-criticisms:

Biolinguistics underplays the complexity and variety of constructions, defining the ways in which words are commonly reordered in sentences. One example is in the contrast between active forms like “Mummy is kissing her” and passive forms like “She is being kissed by Mummy”. This is the critique by ‘Constructionism’. Such critics prioritise constructions over any more general considerations. Passives are commonly used in English. They involve changes in word order, in the case from her to she, in the form of the verb from kissing to being kissed, and in the subject being reworked as part of a by phrase. By most theories, there is a relation between actives and passives. But biolinguistics is said to posit too general a relation. Ambridge writes: “The reality is that children do not appear to be operating with abstract categories at all” (Ambridge, 2004, p. 44). Counter-criticism: As shown by Julie Anne Legate (2014), languages vary in how much of the passive structure they use. Some languages don’t allow any of it, and have no equivalent expressions. English passives represent the most complex case. The passive is not one construction but a combination of different processes, each with a separate explanation.
There are phenomena in language, such as the less common word orders or various degrees of freedom in word order, which are not adequately described or explained. Counter-criticism: The point here is the stock in trade of discussion between generative linguists of all persuasions. Legate (2001) shows that the most extreme case of ‘free’ word-order has an explanation by the movement of all the seeming freely ordered constituents from strictly ordered positions;
Particularly by the work of Ray Jackendoff, biolinguistics hugely overemphasises syntax in relation to semantics. Biolinguistics is characterised as ‘syntactocentric’. It is noted that metaphor appears to be universal across language. But the categories which it manipulates vary from case to case, in ways not easily accountable by biolinguistics. Counter-criticism: This underestimates the deep universality of semantics. Biolinguistics takes as its starting point the case of phenomena which appear to be widely variable but are underlyingly general, not just across any one language, but across languages generally.
The abstract categories of biolinguistics such as those which motivate the phenomena of ‘subjecthood’ and the apparent movement of Wh words, both evident in languages like English, are not adequately or reliably evidenced in all languages. Counter-criticism: By the latest formulation of the biolinguistic model in Chomsky et al (2023), there is only one operation in narrow syntax, namely the process of ‘Merging’ two elements, an operation which is surely irreducible;
There are predictions which are not born out, or not born out accurately. Counter-criticism: But this is so for any theory. And there are more concrete categories which are both better evidenced and which make more reliable predictions. The issue is not whether all possible predictions are confirmed, but whether some predictions are confirmed. It is a matter of judgement which predictions are the most revealing and significant;
The notion of ‘Universal Grammar‘ or UG is a baseless abstraction. Counter-criticism: By the framework here, the emergence of UG in acquisition can be convincingly demonstrated. Most linguists working in any of the various versions of biolinguistics believe in some version of UG. The notion of UG defines an irreducible skeleton for analysing defects in child speech and their asymmetric patterning.

In my view the greatest weakness of these critiques is that they have nothing to say about the evolution ios speech and language.

Large language modeling

However, the most complete rejection of Biolinguistics is by Stephen Piantadosi’s (2023) ‘large language’ model. Piantadosi demonstrates convincingly the ability of current artificial systems, such as ChatGPT, to generate plausible and convincing replicas of natural language. These are, in my view, an extraordinary, engineering achievement. But the training is on data sets far larger than those available to the child. And these datasets are not compromised by incomplete or plainly ungrammatical sentences or inconsistencies such as those between parents speaking different varieties of a language, or even parents speaking different languages, communicating with one another in some sort of pigeon, and so on. Piantadosi’s model says nothing about how or why human language with all of its extraordinary complexity evolved to have the precise and particular forms which it demonstrably has. The Universal Grammar postulated here is motivated by the need to explain the evolvability and learnability of natural language in the imperfect and wildly variable circumstances into which children are born, all having randomly different linguistic experiences. Somehow they all converge on a single grammar. (See Roni Katzir (2023), and Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull (2023) for more extended versions of this negative view of Piantadosi proposal).

A proposal

It might be asked: with opposition like this, isn’t biolinguistics doomed? But by the framework and the proposal here, I assume here that biolinguistics is very much alive and kicking and has more to say about the special problems of delays and disorders of speech and language development than the sum of the criticisms. Against Ambridge (2004, 2010), I argue that there is evidence of the most abstract of biolingustic phenomena, namely Phase, which starts to become evident between the ages of two and three.

A comparison with medicine

Medical innovations are not always welcome. In 1847 the newly qualified Dr Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis observed that maternal mortality was ten times greater where the delivery was by doctors than where it was by midwives. The discrepancy was detected by the population at large, and women started avoiding the doctors’ wards. Semmelweis introduced regular, compulsory hand-washing on his wards, And the discrepancy in the mortality disappeared, But Semmelweis’s idea of PR was to tell doctors who disagreed with him that they were murdering their patients. Unsurprisingly this was not a success, And he was sent to a lunatic asylum where he died in 1865 with his work unrecognised. Medical authorities did not become convinced of the importance of having clean hands for another 20 years.

245 years before Semmelweis, William Harvey qualified in medicine at the then world-famous University of Padua in 1602, where he was elected as the leader of the English students. Back in England, Harvey began a stellar career in medicine, in 1615 becoming the Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians and in 1618 Physician Extraordinary to the king. But privately Harvey was following his own research agenda. One of his teachers at Padua had drawn attention to the fact that the circulatory system contains valves which allow the blood to flow through them in only one direction. It was believed at the time that the main function of the heart was to keep the body warm. But if so, why did the heart contain one-way valves? Harvey undertook a long series of experiments with the hearts of animals and dead people. In 1628 he published his Anatomical Exercise of the movement of the heart in Animals. He showed that more blood passed through the heart in half an hour than was contained in the body. The heart was a pump. Harvey’s theory meant that the widespread use of bleeding for various disorders was unjustifiable. The reference to animals in the title may have been to discourage any theological reactions. To be on the safe side, Harvey published his book in Latin in Germany. He would have known of the fate of Michael Servetus who had mixed a novel theology and a theory of the circulation of the blood, and been burnt at the stake in 1553 in Geneva. Despite Harvey’s thorough and detailed experimental evidence, his theory met opposition from colleagues, patients, and others including René Descartes. His book was not translated into English for another 20 years.