Editorial: Is the Language Faculty Nonlinguistic?

A line of research in cognitive science over several decades has been dedicated to mapping a hypothetically innate, language-specific cognitive system, a faculty that allows human infants to acquire languages natively without formal instruction and within short periods of time. In recent years, this search has attracted significant controversy in cognitive science generally, and in the language sciences specifically. Some maintain that the search has had meaningful results, though there are different views as to what the findings are: ranging from the view that there is a rich and rather specific set of principles, to the idea that the contents of the language faculty are— while specifiable—in fact extremely minimal. Other researchers rigorously oppose the continuation of this search, arguing that decades of effort have turned up nothing. The fact remains that the proposal of a language-specific faculty was made for a good reason, namely as an attempt to solve the vexing puzzle of language in our species. Much work has been developing to address this, and specifically, to look for ways to characterize the language faculty as an emergent phenomenon; i.e., not as a dedicated, language-specific system, but as the emergent outcome of a set of uniquely human but not specifically linguistic factors, in combination. A number of theoretical and empirical approaches are being developed in order to account for the great puzzles of language—language processing, language usage, language acquisition, the nature of grammar, and language change and diversification. The goal of this Research Topic is to ask whether a paradigm shift has indeed occurred that allows us to conceptualize language not as an innate, dedicated faculty, but as the result of general cognitive abilities adapted for linguistic use. In the first of three review articles, D ˛ abrowska reviews the fundamental arguments in support of the Universal Grammar hypothesis. The focus is on the three most powerful arguments, namely universality, convergence, and poverty of stimulus. The author maintains that all three can be proven wrong: languages have been shown to display deep differences of structure; significant variation has been documented in speakers' knowledge of grammar; and grammatical constructions have been proven to be learnable through input. The second review by Christiansen and Chater takes issue with the latest, most minimal proposal for a language faculty (LF): recursion. Through a review and discussion of genetic, non-human primate and neuro-scientific research the authors argue that an innate LF is evolutionarily …