ReviewNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews2017
Statistical evidence that a child can create a combinatorial linguistic system without external linguistic input: Implications for language evolution.
Review in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Birth of a Language in the Backlands of Brazil.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Using computational modeling to validate the onset of productive determiner-noun combinations in English-learning children.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Structural biases that children bring to language learning: A cross-cultural look at gestural input to homesign.Cognition · 2021Article
- Language Emergence.Annual review of linguistics · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Can a child who is not exposed to a model for language nevertheless construct a communication system characterized by combinatorial structure? We know that deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from acquiring spoken language, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures, called homesigns, to communicate. In this study, we call upon a new formal analysis that characterizes the statistical profile of grammatical rules and, when applied to child language data, finds that young children's language is consistent with a productive grammar rather than rote memorization of specific word combinations in caregiver speech. We apply this formal analysis to homesign, and find that homesign can also be characterized as having productive grammar. Our findings thus provide evidence that a child can create a combinatorial linguistic system without external linguistic input, and offer unique insight into how the capacity of language evolved as part of human biology.
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Registered trials
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