Buzzsaws and blueprints: what children need (or don't need) to learn language.

An old joke that has been circulating for the past decade or so goes as follows: a biologist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist were sitting around discussing the great achievements of their fields. The biologist waxed eloquent about the insights of Darwin’s theory of evolution; the physicist expounded on the implications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Then the cognitive scientist spoke up: ‘Our great discovery is the thermos. You put a cold drink in, the drink stays cold. You fill it with hot soup, the soup stays hot. This is amazing, for how does the thermos know?’ Obviously, this cognitive scientist has asked the wrong question about how the thermos maintains temperatures. In The emergence of language (henceforth, EL), an edited collection of chapters authored by an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, linguists, and cognitive and developmental psychologists, it is suggested that perhaps language acquisition researchers have been making the same mistake as the errant cognitive scientist. To be sure, language is an extremely complex phenomenon, yet it is also elegant. Recognition of these characteristics in all aspects of language (thanks in large part to Chomskyan approaches to linguistics) highlights a well-known apparent paradox: language is hopelessly complex but children acquire it with ease. Solutions to this paradox have typically inspired researchers to posit rules or other kinds of blueprints – knowledge (innate or acquired) that children have to guide their language acquisition. But are these rules truly necessary? Perhaps children do not  how to acquire language any more than a thermos knows how to maintain temperature. Although EL does not represent a single consensus viewpoint, the strong version of the hypothesis being advanced is that language develops like other patterns in nature that are characterized by complexity and elegance (e.g.,