Bio program
The Bioprogramm ( Language Bioprogram Hypothesis , LBH) is a hypothesis of linguist Derek Bickerton a genetically anchored in the brain program that was only for the language acquisition is responsible.
According to this hypothesis, the bio-program enables everyone in childhood to benefit from the linguistic templates that are offered to them. It is mainly active in the first four years of life and makes "learning" a language possible in the first place. The bio-program also enables children to develop a language that does not yet exist without significant outside help and without the possibility of support from their parents.
Research question
With his theory, Bickerton tries to clarify a crucial research question: "How can the child acquire syntactic and semantic patterns of great arbitrariness and complexity in such a way that they can be used creatively without making mistakes?" .
In his opinion, this question is not, or only insufficiently, answered by other explanations for first language acquisition .
Theories of Language Acquisition
Bickerton mainly deals with two approaches. On the one hand, he takes a position on "orthodox learning theory" .
This assumes that the child sets up hypotheses for linguistic relationships when acquiring the first language . The reaction of the environment is now checked to see whether this can be confirmed. With positive reactions , such as B. a praise of the mother, certain structures are taken over into the linguistic usage, in the case of negative reactions these are rejected again to try another hypothesis.
On the other hand, he deals with the theory known as the “Motherese School”.
The “Motherese School” assumes that it is the mother who teaches the child to speak. It makes a significant contribution to how quickly and what your child learns. It adapts to the child's speed and progress, responds to them, confirms or rebukes them. In both approaches, there is hardly any room for biological “preliminary planning” of the brain during language acquisition, since it is assumed that there is a very strong influence of external circumstances.
Bickerton takes up both approaches, but tries to explain ambiguities with the help of the bio-program. He believes that mistakes - wrong hypotheses - arise in language acquisition when the bioprogram determines a different order of learning. The bio-program determines when and what is learned. If a child seems overwhelmed, it is only because the bio-program sets other priorities and it is not yet the turn to learn. Even correcting mistakes here would mean an innate understanding of grammar rules for Bickerton. At the Motherese School , Bickerton asks: If you didn't take a child by the hand while they were learning to walk, would they crawl for life? Would a child never speak even if the mother was not available?
Creole languages as evidence of the existence of a bio-program
Another fact, which also refers to the bio-program here, is the existence of Creole languages , languages that develop even without the parents being able to teach them to the children because they do not speak them themselves.
Definition of creole language: A creole language develops when a daughter generation is forced to develop a new language in a multilingual environment. This is e.g. B. the case with drastic spatial and cultural changes. The Creole language takes up the limited linguistic material available to it, but also contains elements that do not originate from the languages already available and is therefore not identical with the language of the parent generation.
The colonial era and the associated slave trade is often mentioned as an example of the emergence of a Creole language . Back then, the children who were born in the foreign country had to develop a new language in order to be able to communicate. They could not rely on the language of their parents, which consisted of a mixture of their own original language and the language of their owners .
For Bickerton, who has been studying the Hawaiian Creole language HCE ( Hawaii Creole English ) and the Creole language in Guyana for over 20 years , this is where the bio-program is most clearly visible. The learning process is not modified and shaped by already existing language systems, but can follow the natural process as dictated by the bio-program. The bio-program shows itself in the comparison of the emergence of a Creole language and the "normal" first language acquisition. The things that a child learns most easily are often very similar to structures that also play a decisive role in creole language education.
Bickerton tries to prove the existence of a general bio-program by showing examples of commonalities in Creole languages around the world. Creole languages that developed in a more linguistic environment show fewer similarities than Creole languages that were more left to their own devices. The bio-program fills in the existing gaps. An example that Bickerton describes: “ This use of ONE as an indefinite article is found in practically every creole language throughout the world, […] In other words, a child, without any model, created a type of phrase, indefinite-article -plus-noun, in the same way […] as other children did, quite independently, in several other communities widely scattered around the globe. […] The conclusion is surely inescapable that syntax constitutes a biologically based attribute of the species […]. ".
The conclusion that Bickerton draws from his research is the following: Now we can see that children can only learn language because, in effect, they already know a language. The bio-program sets the pace for the first language acquisition, enables children to achieve achievements that nobody could teach them and enables new language creations.
literature
- Derek Bickerton: Language and Human Behavior . University College London Press, London 1996, ISBN 1-85728-541-7 .
- Derek Bickerton: Roots of Language . Karoma Publishers, Ann Arbor 1981, ISBN 0-89720-044-6 .
- Derek Bickerton: "The language bioprogram hypothesis", in: The Behavioral Sciences 7, 173-188, 1984.
- Rebecca Posner: The Romance Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, ISBN 0-521-23654-1 .
Web links
- William H. Calvin, Derek Bickerton: Lingua ex machina. 2000. February 14, 2007.
- Evolution Library: Birth of language. 2001. February 26, 2007.
- Ford, Michael. The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis of Derek Bickerton, "The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), 7, 173-221". ( Memento of August 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Empirical Article Review. 1997. February 26, 2007.