Language development, linguistic input, and linguistic racism.

Language development is both remarkable and unremarkable. It is remarkable because children learn the language(s) around them, signed or spoken, without explicit instruction or correction. It is unremarkable because children have done this for thousands of years without worldwide incident or catastrophe. Yet, much research on this organic developmental phenomenon relies on an empirical falsehood: "quality" linguistic input is necessary to facilitate language development. "Quality" is a value judgment, not a structural feature of any human language. I argue selectively legitimizing some linguistic input as "quality" is possible only through mischaracterizing what language is. This falsehood is also linguistic racism because it is based on a deficit perspective of the early linguistic experiences of a subset of children, specifically racialized children. I explore how linguistic racism stalls our collective understanding of language development and promotes an environment of bad science. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Language Neuroscience > Development.

What Can Cognitive Science Do for People?

The critical question for cognitive scientists is what does cognitive science do, if anything, for people? Cognitive science is primarily concerned with human cognition but has fallen short in continuously and critically assessing the who in human cognition. This complacency in a world where white supremacist and patriarchal structures leave cognitive science in the unfortunate position of potentially supporting those structures. We take it that many cognitive scientists operate on the assumption that the study of human cognition is both interesting and important. We want to invoke that importance to note that cognitive scientists must continue to work to show how the field is useful to all of humanity and reflects a humanity that is not white by default. We wonder how much the field has done, and can do, to show that it is useful not only in the sense that we might make connections with researchers in other fields, win grants and write papers, even of the highest quality, but useful in some material way to the billions of non-cognitive scientists across the globe.

Experience with morphosyntactic paradigms allows toddlers to tacitly anticipate overregularized verb forms months before they produce them.

When do children acquire abstract grammatical categories? Studies of 2- to 3-year-olds' productions of complete morphosyntactic paradigms (e.g., all legal determiners with all nouns) suggest relatively later category acquisition, while studies of infant discrimination of grammatical vs. ungrammatical sequences suggest earlier acquisition. However, few of the latter studies have probed category generalization by examining how learners treat gaps in their input, and none have found evidence that learners before the age of 2 years fill gaps in verb paradigms. Therefore, the three experiments presented here asked whether 16-month-olds tacitly expect to hear forms like breaked by presenting them with overregularized verbs vs. (1) nonce verbs + -ed, (2) real English nouns + -ed, and (3) the correct irregular counterparts. The pattern of listening preferences suggests that toddlers anticipate overregularized forms, suggesting that they have a general proto-category verb, to which they expect the complete set of verb inflections to apply.