The Child as Linguist

(source: as mathematics)
Overwhelming data now exists to substantiate the hypothesis that from the outset infants posses linguistic data in linguistically constrained ways. Further there is the possibilty of a more constructivist position of representational flexibility which leads ultimately to metalinguistic awareness. The child's 'hypothesis space' with respect to the possible meaning of the words of the language is subject to principled constraints...young infants engage in a process of perceptual analysis which goes beyond their rapid and automatic computation of perceptual input. Perceptual analysis results in the formation of perceptual primitives such as SELF-MOTION/CAUSED MOTION/PATH/SUPPORT/AGENT. These primitives guide the way in which infants parse events into seperate entities that are supported or contained and which move from sources to goals along specific kinds of paths according to whether the movement is animate or inanimate.
(NB: children are not satisfied with success in learning to talk or solve problems; they want to understand how they do these things. And in seeking such understanding they become little theorists. Development and learning then, seem to take two complementary directions. On the one hand they involve the gradual process of proceduralization (that is, rendering behaviour more automatic and less accessible). On the other hand they involve a process of 'explication' and increasing accessibility (that is, representing explicitly information that is implicit in the procedural representations sustaining the stucture of behaviour). Both are relevant to cognitive change but the main focus will be the process of representational explication. Mandler argues that these perceptual primitives are redescribed into an accessible image-schematic format, thereby providing a level of representation intermediate between perception and language. And it is these accessible image schemas that factilitate semantic development (ie., the mapping between language and conceptual categories). Image schemas are non-propositional, analogue representations of spacial relations and movements; that is they are conceptual structures mapped from spacial structure.