(1) (just to get my prejudices out in the open) Chomsky’s full of it. His linguistics is crap. It changes radically every few years so that it says less and less about anything even vaguely observable in language. Whether or not children have built-in language abilities, Chomsky’s way of theorizing about it is worthless.
(2) Despite that, the post about “superbabies” and language does not use Chomsky’s terminology even slightly correctly. “Deep Structure” and “Surface Structure” are very imaginatively compelling terms and people tend to take them out of Chomsky and make them mean whatever they imagine they must mean. In this case, the writer has taken the term “deep structure” and made it mean what Chomsky meant by Universal Grammar (UG). That’s not what he meant by Deep Structure.
What he did mean by Deep Structure is less interesting and deeply embedded in the particular arguments he was making. Basically he was claiming that the mathematical complexity of human languages is such that it is in principle impossible to learn them via inference. Specifically he stated that human languages cannot be generated by “context-free” grammars (a technical term that computer scientists should be familiar with) alone; they also had to have a “transformational” component, which took a “deep structure” generated by a “context-free” grammar and applied transformations to produce a “surface structure” which was the actual structure of the utterance we saw. (The classic illustration of this is that the active and passive forms of a sentence have the same Deep Structures but different Surface Structures, but Chomsky rejected that idea before very long.) “Deep Structure” and “Surface Structure” were nothing more than theoretical components of a formal model of language which was of sufficient complexity to necessitate the existence of an embedded Universal Grammar so that we could learn it at all.
None of this stuff appears in the same form in anything written today by Chomsky – if you thought it was abstruse then, he’s sailed far far off into the stratosphere since then, and it’s probably been decades since he made any falsifiable claims. (Chomskians are very fond of claiming that they make empirical claims, but they usually end up being so qualified that they’re practically speaking unfalsifiable.) Indeed, fairly early on Chomsky stopped using the terms Deep Structure and Surface Structure because people liked them too much and misused them too much; he stuck to DS and SS (and eventually the role of DS diminished in his theory to the point that it disappeared).
Overall, I don’t think that Chomsky is a very useful person to bring up in a discussion of childhood development. He really had nothing much to say about childhood mental development in general, outside of broad claims made to justify his particular theories of linguistics.
What’s worse is that Ken was so busy discussing Chomsky, he never bothered to explain the “superbabies” concept; he dispensed with the theory before explaining what the theory is, why some experts believed in it, and whether there were any successes. It could have been an interesting read if he spent some time researching the issue. Ken used the question as an excuse to discuss Chomsky, and discuss him poorly.
On this subject more generally, and with some reference to Chomsky’s language acquisition ideas, I recommend the sections on early childhood learning in Steven Pinker’s “How the Brain Works” and “The Blank Slate.” Both of these debunk the idea to some extent that children are ‘blank slates’ that can learn anything in profusion at an early age, without denying that it is a critical period for learning in general and language acquisition in particular.
Pinker’s a complete tool of Chomsky’s though. Don’t believe a word of what he says about language. (Whether he has anything useful to say about anything else I don’t know.)
Another point in the reader’s letter to which no response was made - Rick Moranis’ character in “Parenthood” was inserted as an example of BAD parenting. B-A-D, as in DON’T DO THIS! If you want evidence of the negative effects of treating your child like a sponge and inserting as much information as possible, I’ll send you my shrink bills from the last 20+ years.
On the other hand, if you want to raise a Taoist, stuff 'em full of superfluous knowledge at an early age & watch 'em swim to shore.
Perhaps the term “superbabies” was born in the eighties, but the concept of pushing your child intellectualy as hard as they can take is as old as Mozart and John Stuart Mill, both born way before 1980.
I was also wondering about the fixation on language development in the column, to the detriment of even explaining what a “superbaby” is supposed to be.
But the column ended nicely, with my thoughts on the matter explained succinctly (I’ve never read Spock or any baby book*:
I’m sure none of you are as pompous as your replies make you appear.
Babies are busy during that critical “sponge” period. Yes, of course, they’re learning may be directed to some extent, but in fact they must learn about 90% of everything they will ever learn, so if one chooses to direct them in a specific area, one runs the risk of sacrificing some other needed lesson. Often, unfortunately, that sacrifice is in an area of social interaction. Wouldn’t a child be better off, in the long run, to be socially well adjusted, rather than a parent’s trick pony?
Just my opinion.
I edited Ken’s column about superbabies and added the stuff about Chomsky. You are right that I used the term “deep structure” improperly and will have to amend the column - as you say it is an easy mistake to make. The necessary terminological edits having been made, however, I think the point made in the article remains valid. The extraordinary speed with which infants acquire language argues strongly that they’re not blank slates but rather have some innate linguistic faculty.
I disagree. I grant you my view is colored by an interview I once did with Chomsky’s wife Carol, who is (or was when I spoke to her) at Harvard’s school of education, and my recollection is that her views on language acquisition (we spoke about teaching children to read) had been informed by her husband’s ideas. At any rate, whatever you may think of Chomsky, he was the first to put the question of inherent language abilities squarely on the table. I grant you nothing has been conclusively demonstrated, but the implications for childhood development seem plain, even if you don’t buy them.
