ABSTRACT
The thing about language acquisition, to paraphrase Will Rogers’ comment about the weather, is that everybody talks about it, but nobody changes it. The talk in developmental psycholinguistics over the past 20 or so years has largely taken the form of rhetorical exercises in which descriptions of the course of language development in small numbers of middle class children have formed the basis of theories of the nature of language. Most of these theories have pivoted on the nativism-empiricism issue, coming down for the most part on the side of nativism. For example, Brown and Herrnstein (1975) state that, “one irresistibly has the impression of a biological process developing in just the same way in the entire human species, though greatly varying in its speed in different individuals” (p. 479).
