The Relationship between Critical Period Hypothesis and Pidgin and Creole Languages
Samaneh Akbari
2010
Abstract
Pidgin and creoles provide direct evidence for the critical period
hypothesis and that they can be explained on the basis of the critical
period hypothesis. The critical period hypothesis holds that there is a
biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired
more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to
acquire .This study is aimed at understanding the relationship between
critical period hypothesis and pidgin and Creole languages. The critical
period hypothesis seems to be the reason for the striking differences of
pidgin and creoles. The fact that creoles are developed by children who
are obviously still in their Critical period is a clear evidence for the
hypothesis.
The relationship between Critical period hypothesis and Pidgin and Carole languages
The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal 'window' of time to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which this is no longer possible.
The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli. If language input doesn't occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of language — especially grammatical systems. The critical period hypothesis holds that there is “a biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired more easily and beyond which time language is increasingly difficult to acquire” (Brown 1994, p. 52). For example there is a critical period in learning to really master some music instruments especially the violin and the piano. If one starts two late the complex and fast movements of the fingers will not be learned as good as by early starters. Already at the time of Mozart music education started in early childhood because this critical period was known. Another commonly known fact is that the general cognitive abilities decay with age and old people finds many memory tasks more difficult than young people.
Evidence for existence of critical period
The best evidence for the existence of a critical period would be of course an experiment like the Egyptian king Psammetichus conducted. But luckily this is not possible due to moral conventions of the society. Unfortunately there are sometimes cases where children were deprived from linguistic input for various reasons. Theses cases are then particular interesting for linguistic research. We presented three cases of such cases, Isabelle, Genie and Chelsea. Isabelle was raised by a speechless mother and had not learned any language when she was found at the age of six. Within only one year Isabelle learned to speak at the level of her 7 year old peers. As Isabelle was still within the time window of the critical period her quick language acquisition is exactly what was expected by the hypothesis. The second child, Genie, was found at the age of 13. Genie was kept by her parents in the attic and beaten constantly. She grew up totally isolated in her room and was never spoken to. When she was found there were great attempts to teach her language. Genie made great process but never managed to acquire normal language abilities. Her development suggest that there are some aspects of language which can be learned after the critical period but also some which must be learned during the critical period. One of the things Genie mastered was the basic word order. But Genie performed only very poorly on performs movement rules, passive constructions, noun verb agreements, auxiliary structures and reflexives. She also never used functional category words. The study of Genies development is also particular interesting as one can compare her use of language with the grammatical structure of so called pidgin languages. The most astonishing finding is that pidgin languages typically lack the same structures as Genie does. I will discuss this topic later in more detail. Besides from the fact that Genie did not develop normal language abilities she was also abnormally slow at language learning. This might suggest that she could be retarded or have some serious damages from her childhood. But this was not the case, on the contrary in tests which rely entirely on the right hemisphere Genie scored higher than normally intelligent persons. This suggest that Genie most of the time uses her fight hemisphere to solve cognitive task and also for language processing. S. Curtiss who did most of the studies with Genie concluded that "the cortical tissue normally committed to language and related abilities my functionally atrophy" if language is not acquired at the appropriate time.
But this also changes the view on the critical period. Now we should see the critical period not as a period for language acquisition but as a period for functional development of the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere seems to be more specialized for language learning and some other tasks while the right hemisphere seems to be more flexible in taking on various tasks but performs them not as good as the left hemisphere.
The third and last case we discussed was a woman, Chelsea, at the age of 31. Chelsea was deaf but mistakenly diagnosed by doctors as retarded. When her deafness was recognized at the age of 31 she had not learned any language. She acquired a sizeable vocabulary and produced multiword utterances but her sentences do not even have the rudimentary grammatical structure of Genie's. As Chelsea was already way beyond the critical period this was exactly what the hypothesis would predict.
Pidgin
Pidgin is a language with a very limited vocabulary and a simplified grammar. Pidgins usually arise to permit communication between groups with no language in common; if a pidgin becomes established as the native language of a group, it is known as a Creole. Pidgins such as Chinese Pidgin English and Melanesian Pidgin English arose through contact between English-speaking traders and inhabitants of East Asia and the Pacific islands. Other pidgins appeared with the slave trade in Africa and with the importation of West African slaves to Caribbean plantations. Pidgin has these features:
- No native speakers. Pidgins are intermediate communications systems between two or more languages. Usually begin in maritime environments.
- A marginal or mixed communication system that takes linguistic elements from several different languages.
- Limited vocabulary
- Reduced grammatical structure
- Narrow range of linguistic functions
- Creative and remarkably adaptive
The earliest documented pidgin is the Lingua Franca (or Sabir) that developed among merchants and traders in the Mediterranean in the middle Ages; it remained in use through the 19th cent. Other known pidgins have been employed in different regions since the 17th cent. An example is the variety of Pidgin English that resulted from contacts between English traders and the Chinese in Chinese ports. In fact, the word pidgin supposedly is a Chinese (Cantonese) corruption of the English word business. Another well-known form of Pidgin English is the Beach-la-Mar (or Bêche-de-Mer) of the South Seas. The different kinds of pidgin English have preserved the basic grammatical features of English, at the same time incorporating a number of non-English syntactical characteristics. The great majority of words in pidgin English are of English origin, but there are also Malay, Chinese, and Portuguese elements. As a result of European settlers bringing to the Caribbean area large numbers of slaves from West Africa who spoke different languages, other pidgins evolved in that region that were based on English, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Spanish. Examples of pidgins based on non-European languages are Chinook, once used by Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and Lingua Gêral, based on a Native American language and used in Brazil. The Krio language of Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea are examples of creoles, pidgins that have acquired native speakers.
Because of their limited function, pidgin languages usually do not last for very long —sometimes for only a few years, and rarely for more than a century. They die when the original reason for communication diminishes or disappears, as communities move apart, or one community learns the language of another. (Alternatively, the pidgin may develop into a Creole.)For example, the pidgin French which was used in Vietnam all but disappear when the French left; similarly, the pidgin English which appeared during the American Vietnam campaign virtually disappeared as soon as the war was over.
Creole
A Creole usually arises when speakers of one language become economically or politically dominant over speakers of another. A simplified or modified form of the dominant group's language (pidgin), used for communication between the two groups, may eventually become the native language of the less-powerful community. Examples include Gullah (derived from English), spoken in the Sea Islands of the southeastern U.S.; Haitian Creole (derived from French), spoken in Haiti; and Papiamentu (derived from Spanish and Portuguese), spoken in Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire. Creole Occurs over several generations:
1) Lose native language;
2) Only use pidgin that will contain elements of the original language;
3) Eventually expanded into a fully developed language.
From pidgin to Creole
The switch from pidgin to Creole involves a major expansion in the structural linguistic resources available– especially in vocabulary, grammar, and style, which have to cope with the everyday demands made upon a mother tongue by its speakers.
The reasons for this are : Pidgins are by their nature auxiliary languages, learned alongside vernacular languages which are much more developed in structure and use. Creoles, by contrast, are vernaculars in their own right.
Grammar and Innateness
Grammar is seen when pidgins evolve into creoles. Usually the children who are raised speaking with the pidgins will get together and agree upon a structure of words for the pidgin, this applies grammar to their system of communication to create the Creole. The Creole is usually formed without adult influence, brings in the question of innateness. The fact that these children form grammar together, from a system of words, without adult help, is evidence for the fact that applying structure to language, and forming grammar is innate. These children have no models to work by, there is nothing about structure that they have already learned, thus, grammar formation appears to be a unique and innate characteristic of human beings.
Some structural differences between Pidgin and Creole
It is often said that Creole drive from Pidgins become Creole languages (having different properties) once learnt by children, or used in the full range of speech situations. It may well be reasonable to hypothesize a pidgin origin for Creole language. The problem is that we don’t have any historical evidence for any Caribbean Creole language or Indian Ocean Creole being preceded by a pidgin.
It is true that every sources of Jamaican, Guyanese or Sranan show pidgin-like traits such as the absences of TMA making (Arends 1989), but whether this is a reflection of an earlier pidgin stages, or just a case of poor observation is not clear.
It appears that pidgins and Creoles have few structural traits in common. Some of the most important structural differences are summarized here:
- Whereas all Creole languages have SVO word order, Pidgins can have any conceivable word order, including variable order.
- TMA is expressed by adverbs, if at all , in pidgins but mostly by preverbal elements in Creoles.
- Reduplication is a common, almost universal process in Creole languages, but it is rarely in Pidgins, through common in extended pidgins.
Reasons for the development of Pidgins
In the nineteenth century, when slaves from Africa were brought over to North America to work on the plantations, they were separated from the people of their community and mixed with people of various other communities, therefore they were unable to communicate with each other. The strategy behind this was so they couldn't come up with a plot to escape back to their land. Therefore, in order to finally communicate with their peers on the plantations, and with their bosses, they needed to form a language in which they could communicate. Pidgins also arose because of colonization. Prominent languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch were the languages of the coloni zers. They traveled, and set up ports in coastal towns where shipping and trading routes were accessible.
There is always a dominant language which contributes most of the vocabulary of the Pidgin; this is called the superstrate language. The superstrate language from the Papua New Guinea Creole example above is English. The other minority languages that contribute to the Pidgin are called the substrate languages.
Today, the study of Creole languages, and of the pidgins which give rise to them, attracts considerable interest among linguists and social historians. To the former, the cycle of linguistic reduction and expansion which they demonstrate, within such a short time-scale, provides fascinating evidence of the nature of language change.
To the latter, their development is seen to reflect the process of exploration, trade, and conquest which has played such a major part in European history over the past 400 yeas
The critical period hypothesis and Pidgin and Creole languages
The form and structure of pidgin languages are very simple. Upon further analysis one can discover that their grammar and usage resembles very much the language used by Genie or Chelsea and the errors performed by late learners also seem to be a present feature of pidgin languages.
Pidgin languages are generally learned by adults therefore. It is no big surprise that the adults who “invent” the pidgin invent it by incorporating the late first and second language learners usually make. Also a striking feature of the Pidgin languages is that they show a highly variable use of grammar, exactly what has been found in the error patterns of late learners in the studies by Newport (1990) presented by us. This suggests that the poor grammatical structure of Pidgin languages is mainly due to the fact that the "learners" of the Pidgin are adults who are beyond their critical period for language acquisition. In this sense a Pidgin has a very high similarity to a learned second language spoken by some poorly performing adult. If you encounter a German in France who learned French very poorly and late in life the structure of his sentences should resemble a Pidgin with French as superstrate and German as substrate language, as much French vocabulary as possible but used with a rather German grammar. At least this is what I would assume.
But when children learn the Pidgin language as their native language they start to change it. On the basis of the critical period hypothesis this occurs because the children are still able to fully grasp the complexity of a natural language. The start the process of creolization and learn a complex Creole language with an uniform grammar across its speakers. This is also what was found out by Newport (1990) , early learners showed a highly consistent use of their grammar and rather made componential and omission errors. This similarity suggests that children are solely responsible for this regularization process of the Pidgin grammar.
Conclusion
As outlined above the critical period hypothesis is at least partially able to explain the existence and structure of Pidgin and Creole languages. These two phenomenons, the invention of Pidgins and their evolution to Creoles, are exactly what one would expect if the critical period hypothesis is correct. Therefore these two topics of language acquisition are very strongly related and should always be considered together. It cannot be by pure accident that adults are worse at language learning and that Pidgins are produced or "invented" by adults. And it is also not an accident that children who learn a language that easily start the process of creolization.
We can Therefore conclude that the critical period seems to be a feature of humans which ultimately leads to Pidgin creation and Creole creation. By this mechanism nature manages to produce an elaborate language system with complex grammatical features which might need to evolve over some generations but is finally a much regularized system with clear cut rules.
References
Books:
-Brown, D.H.2007. Principles of language learning and teaching. New York, Pearson Education. Inc.
-Schmitt, N.2002.An introduction to applied linguistics. New York: Oxford university press, Inc.
-Stedt, N.2002.The critical period hypothesis supported by Genie’s case. Germany
-Lefebvre, C.2004.Issue in the study of pidgin and Creole languages. Library of congress
-Holm, J.1994.Pidgin and Creoles. New York: Cambridge university press
-Arends, J.Muysken, P.Smith, N.1994.Pidgin and creoles. Library of congress
-Yule, G.1999. The study of language. UK.cambridge.
Internet:
- Hakuta, K.Bialystock, E.Wiley, E. (2003).Critical period evidence. Retrieved from the web November 18, 2009.
-David, C. (2009).Critical period hypothesis. Retrieved from the web November 17, 2009.
-Baky, D.(2002).The critical period hypothesis: Is younger really better?. Retrieved from the web November 17, 2009.
http://www. lib.nagaokaut.ac.jp/kiyou/data/language/g11/G11_7.pdf
- Tichacek, K, K. (2002).Critical period hypothesis and pidgin and Creole languages. Retrieved from the web February 10, 2010.
http://www.duke.edu/~kl41/DATA/CriticalPeriod.pdf
-Briney, A.(2009).Lingua franca. Retrieved from the web February 10,2010.
http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/linguafranca.htm
هیچ نظری موجود نیست:
ارسال یک نظر