ABSTRACT
In thinking about human origins, there has always been a tendency to take the child as a model of the primordial state of the species or its ancestors. For the past several centuries, philosophers and psychologists and anthropologists have made analogies between psychological characteristics of children and animals, children and “primitive” peoples, and, inevitably, children and our proto-hominid ancestors. Advances in developmental and comparative psychology, along with anthropology, have made the first two analogies untenable. Human children are not the same as mature monkeys and apes, and preliterate societies are not childlike. But in the current scientific fascination with the origin of the species, it has become fashionable again to propose that human children are in some ways models of mature proto- or prehominids. Nowhere has this proposal received more circulation than in discussions about the evolution of language (e.g., Bickerton, 1990; Givón, 1998, 2002). Most recently, Givón stated that “an analogical, recapitulationist perspective on language evolution is both useful and legitimate” (Givón, 2002, p. 35). I suggest that this recent form of the recapitulationist argument will fail. In the global classical version of Haeckel’s biogenetic law, the proposal was abandoned on the basis of evidence from embryology and physiological development. By contrast, the current proposal—especially in the version proposed by Bickerton—is not compatible with what we know about the psycholinguistic development of human children and the processes of historical development of existing human languages.
