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A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration of the Mechanisms Underlying Child Language Acquisition: Progress, Challenges and Outlook |
Zhou Peng |
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Abstract Language is fundamentally a biologically determined computational cognitive system that enables us to produce and understand an infinite number of hierarchically structured expressions. Infants develop this system remarkably quickly within the first few years of life, and by age 5, they are effectively adult-like in their language competence. The development of language, like any biological system, is shaped both by internal constraints and by language experience from the external environment. This paper first gives an overview of major research questions and debates in the field of child language research in the past 50 years, and then reviews prior cross-disciplinary investigations that attempted to address these questions. On the basis of the prior research, the paper proposes a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of child language that integrates fields like linguistics, cognitive science, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence. This cross-disciplinary approach requires a new generation of child language researchers who are well versed in the child language research tradition, well informed about cross-disciplinary approaches that integrate the relevant fields, as well as open-minded to explore new possibilities for cross-disciplinary collaborations when looking into the grand areas of language, mind and brain.
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