A decline in disorder, more order

By the principle of entropy, order naturally declines. But where the natural process of language acquistion goes awry, patterns emerge in the resulting disorder. By the principle in entropy there should not be any patterns. Why should this be? 

Nunes (2002) proposed an answer on the basis of a proposal originally due to Martin Atkinson (1982), then popularised by Steven Pinker (1984) under the name of the ‘Continuity Hypothesis’, no funtionality can be postulated in acquisition which is not evidenced in competent language. I postulated a dedicated acquisition functionality. But I now reject that idea. I propose instead that the Continuity Hypothesis should be extended:

• By a human-specific adaptation, the evolution of language was linear and continuous from the start, defined on progressively smaller sets of elements as the evolution continued.

In support of the continuity principle as extended here, there is evidence that the first phonemes are themselves defined on constituent features. This is not to say that the first externalisations by human ancestors on the pathway to modern speech and lanaguage were like modern words, but only that they were built from constituents. They may have sounded much like the externalisations of modern chimpanzees. But by the proposal here, they were differently organised, each with a unique index.

Even in severe disorder, featural organisation is respected. For instance, one child at the age of two had very little speech; but of the few words he had, he could say more with a lip articulation in the M and corresponding lip rounding in the vowel and knee with a tongue tip articulation in the N and a corresponding high front articulation in the vowel, but in me and gnaw the M and N sounds were seemingly unpronouncable. His problem was that he was projecting the features onto words, rather than speech sounds. And derivational sequence is similarly respected. Another child at the age of three and a half chattered almost non-stop, but incomprehensibly. Even her mother could hardly understand a word she said. On careful analysis, she was following the correct derivational sequence for the main articulators, but twice, first with a set of ad hoc conditions, and then in the normal way. But the effect of the ad hoc conditions was to a very complex set of assimilations, going almost all, logically-possible ways, making her incomprehensible.

By the proposal here, the apparent order in disorder is a function of the way speech evolved.