Bruner and Wittgenstein: Language Learning

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Bruner and Wittgenstein: Language Learning

A crucial phase in the child's development comes with its acquisition of language, but before we can engage in any pedagogical efforts to further infant development or to aid atypical cases, we need to understand methodologically what occurs during language learning. Jerome Bruner, in a methodological adaptation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's middle and later work in an extension of Noam Chomsky's LAD, has put forth one influential proposal (Bruner 1983). Ludwig Wittgenstein's own remarks on the topic also furnish an interesting story independent of Bruner's selective use of his corpus, especially insofar as his approach results in an irreducible riddle and a hypothesis by his own account (Wittgenstein 1953 and 1958). The two views are explored, contrasted and critiqued. In the end, neither will do to resolve problems in our methodological understanding of language acquisition, for which the most important reasons are given.

Most children learn language with remarkable ease, but how are we to account for this extraordinary fact? The problem plaguing our understanding of language and language acquisition can be described as. How can one learn anything genuinely new and become linguistically creative and how this learning is possible at all, unless one already has some path into language, for example, a suitable framework in which language learning takes place? It is this framework that interests us here.

One possible picture is provided by St. Augustine, who likens the child's learning of language to a stranger coming into a foreign land, unable to understand what is said, yet already in possession of some language, only not the one spoken 'here.' To Wittgenstein, the picture painted in St. Augustine's Confessions is not representative of the scenery encountered by the first-time language learner, for this stranger who slowly decodes the puzzle of the strange surrounding sounds already has a framework. St. Augustine alters the character of the learner so that the issue of a suitable framework does not arise. Philosophers like Chomsky or Fodor, although historically distant from Augustine, try to provide a new answer to the same question. Their solution differs only in the sense that it shifts the problem onto a 'universal grammar' or a 'language acquisition device', which thus provides the entry point into language.

In his effort to dissolve philosophical issues, Wittgenstein makes a great many methodological suggestions in his later work, criss-crossing language, meaning, thought, and so forth. We also find a number of remarks about the early stages of language learning, where, according to his suggestion, at first simple forms of performative training occur between teacher and pupil, void of explanation on the part of the teacher, and void of understanding on the child's. Only later in the child's development, when common judgements have been absorbed, does an understanding of language displace merely conditioned behavioural responses. When the linguistic performances of the child indicate that there is not only imitation but also understanding, perhaps best demonstrated by the ability to teach the use of linguistic conventions, the child can be said to properly follow rules in their usage. What is troubling with Wittgenstein's suggestions, both to him and to us, is that at least some of his remarks are clearly hypothetical in the sense he wishes to avoid.

In Child's Talk, Jerome Bruner's points out that the lexico-grammatical training of quasi-Wittgensteinian language-games does play a role in the child's linguistic development, but that it is preceded by systematic and abstract pre-linguistic forms of communication of equal or even greater importance, which, together with certain cognitive endowments and suitable social encouragement, first provide the support needed for the child to develop linguistic skills. Pace Wittgenstein, Bruner suggests that children typically need not be drilled as suggested, but that they have a natural tendency towards both mutual attention and agreeing on reference ("referential intersubjectivity", Bruner 1983, 27, 122), which is augmented by a device to acquire language. Children are treated by their caretakers as proper partners in a hermeneutic process of communication — as if the infant understood. However, Bruner cannot make these claims without also introducing a number of cognitive endowments, which act as guarantors for proper language learning, roughly equivalent in function to the performative training Wittgenstein's children undergo.

To Wittgenstein, we do not use language according to strict rules, nor is language taught to us by such rules outside of some highly specialized applications (Wittgenstein 1958, 25). Bruner agrees with this anti-formalist attitude. Language acquisition, to him, is quite literally the entrance into Wittgensteinian forms of life (Bruner 1983, 62). Antithetical to this, Bruner hypothesizes extensively about children's ability to learn language in what he openly calls "the a priori side of it" (Bruner 1983, 122). In Child's Talk, we thus encounter a mixture of cognitive endowments children are said to have, biological competence, along with various forms of social encouragement, cultural context, both of which go hand in hand with a child's cognitive unfolding. To him, infants have a natural disposition towards systematicity and means-end abstraction, which is augmented by the constrained, familiar situations of action and interaction which support a high degree of order. Infants are extraordinarily social and communicative, showing a Bühlerian Funktionslust: they love to play (Bruner 1983, 47). Children eagerly respond to others' actions, spending many hours playfully doing a limited number of things with their caretakers, repeatedly going through the child's ever-growing repertoire of games, responding to prompts, exchanging smiles, and so forth. Underlying a child's approach to the world is a nave realism: children do not question the existence of mental phenomena, other beings or physical objects. At first they cannot distinguish between thoughts and things, or between others' and their own mental activity. But even extremely young children have communicative intentions that they try to make clear through constant and repeated negotiations. Over time, such negotiations lead to ever more complex communicative and then to recognizable linguistic procedures, to language-games. Language learning consists not only of learning grammar, but "of realizing one's intentions in the appropriate use of that grammar" (Bruner 1983, 38). To account for the extraordinary fact that children learn language, Bruner posits some Language Acquisition Device (LAD), in mutual response to which the social environment acts as a Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). It is with this a priori side that I think we must take issue. Call LAD and LASS what you will, according to Bruner the specific nomenclature does not matter. He has little difficulty in asserting such functional mechanisms, perhaps because they replace the idea that language 'grows out of' proto-phonological, -syntactic, -semantic, or -pragmatic knowledge with the idea that, before any LAD can 'generate linguistic hypotheses,' the primitive procedures found in pre-linguistic communication must function adequately. This entails a sensitivity towards, for example, "a patterned sound system, to grammatical constraints, to referential requirements, to communicative intentions, etc." (Bruner 1983, 31). It is this sensitivity or disposition that 'grows' into place, not the finished product.

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Wittgenstein would not approve of Bruner. He falls victim to his dictum that what should be done is not to attempt to define or to explain, as Bruner has done with his hypothesis about the underlying mechanism or structure of language learning, which will generate further instances of metaphysics in the narrow conception Wittgenstein has of it. The assertion of a modified Chomskian view in Bruner's Child Talk, apart from the fact that its explanatory benefit is circular, may create more problems than it solves. The introduction of a device that helps us acquire language seemingly serves the purpose ...

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