What Children Know When They Know What a Name Is: The Non-Cartesian View of Language Acquisition
Author(s)
Shanker, Stuart
Abstract
Nativist theories of language insist that an infant must possess some abstract concepts about the structure of language or, at the very least, some word-learning biases to be able to acquire the sorts of skills and knowledge displayed by competent language-speakers. A direct consequence of Cartesian epistemology, nativism limits the role of linguistic anthropology to validating its claim that children typically acquire language in essentially the same manner, regardless of the culture in which they are raised. It seeks to confine linguistic anthropology to the study of the socialization processes whereby children use their “innate” linguistic knowledge to become accepted members of their community. Linguistic anthropologists, in contrast, see field studies as a way of discovering what children in different societies actually learn about a language when they learn how to speak. In this non-Cartesian approach, children are seen as learning how to do different kinds of things with words-how to engage in the culturally significant actions that make up their community’s “form of life.” The case of proper names in Anglo-American and Navaho culture is here examined as an illustration of the significance of this epistemological shift.
