For this lecture you will be reading Chater & Christiansen (2010). The plan for this lecture is to take what we have learned about iterated learning, and return to a fundamental question in linguistics: to what extent do humans bring innate, domain-specific knowledge to the task of language acquisition? Chater & Christiansen argue that a proper understanding of how languages evolve culturally undermines the arguments in favour of Universal Grammar. I’m not sure I buy all the aspects of the paper – we’ll come to the ‘logical problem of language evolution” shortly – but I love the distinction between C- and N-induction, and I think the authors mount a compelling argument. See what you think.
About Chater & Christiansen
You already came across Morten Christiansen in the reading for lecture 6. Nick Chater is a Prof at Warwick Business School, but once upon a time, like all the best people, he was based in Edinburgh. You may also have heard him on Radio 4, in the series The Human Zoo.
Post-reading quiz
You should do the post-reading quiz, and look at my brief comments.
References
Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2010) Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34, 1131-1157