A Baseline for Language

This week’s reading by Eve Clark examined the ways in which children and adults use suffixes such as “-er” to describe what something is or what it does. For example, a “stopper” is something or someone who stops things. Based on Clark’s research, it would appear that children below the age of 12 have a more limited ability to form and interpret the “-er” variations of existing words such as “stop”. The “-er” suffix can be added to create nouns, such as typewriter, or imply agency, such as writer, and this is where the true difficulty lies. Humans often create new descriptive words by utilizing a “conventional” format for “-er” which appears to develop in adult speakers. As a result, speakers above the age of 12 tend to have an increased ability to consistently use the “-er” suffix for its agentive meaning while those beyond the age of 17 demonstrated an increased ability to use “-er” for both its meanings.

            In my opinion, this pattern makes biological sense as the minds of younger children are still developing and therefore less attuned to some of the nuances of English, or any other language for that matter. It would surprise me if children acquired proper usage of both meanings of the “-er” suffix from a very early age because it would almost imply that they had some sort of advance knowledge on how to properly apply the suffix despite tending to have smaller vocabularies and lower understanding of the breadth of “conventional” language. This would in turn imply that humans are attuned to some set way of speaking rather than being highly malleable in their capacity for verbal communication. However, the argument that “-er” is not innate and must be learned goes against reasoning we have made in class about an understanding of parts or even all of human language which is innate.

I argue that if an innate understanding of language is true, then the ability to properly manipulate the “-er” suffix is simply not a component of language which is ingrained while the brain is developing. The “-er” suffix is very specific to pervading languages of the modern world and a developing human brain therefore has no way of knowing how to properly apply this suffix without first receiving significant exposure to it.

This line of thought drives a deeper question: what is the minimum level of innate understanding necessary for language at the human-level to develop? My understanding is that some animals have languages, but none possess all aspects of human language. The way I see it, newborn children have a nebulous and abstract understanding of “language”, which solidifies into an understanding of a specific language or languages as they learn to speak. If this sort of baseline understanding of language exists, I would be interested in an investigation to define its characteristics.