Usage-Based Approach to Language Acquisition

Exposure to Usage and the Application of Domain-General Skills

Central to the usage-based approach is the idea that children can learn language solely by being exposed to language use and through their cognitive analysis of this linguistic experience using domain-general skills. In this way, the approach represents a departure from the long-held nativist view that children could not acquire language based only on what they hear in the input as they would not be exposed to enough exemplars of the structures that they nevertheless acquire. This “argument from the poverty of the stimulus,” presented as a main argument for the proposal of innate linguistic knowledge (notably, Noam Chomsky’s Theory of Universal Grammar), is disputed in the usage-based view. While the usage-based approach agrees that the ability to acquire language must have some innate basis, since every typically developing child is able to accomplish this, it does not assume any innate linguistic knowledge. Focusing on empirical data from linguistic corpora, it instead argues that the input indeed contains sufficient exemplars for children to acquire language. It proposes that they achieve this by analyzing the input using domain-general cognitive and social skills, such as intention reading and pattern finding, rather than requiring any knowledge or abilities that are specific to language [Page 2021]itself. Indeed, the usage-based approach places great importance on the development of these domain-general skills (during the first year of life) as a precursor to language development (which usually starts at around one year of age). For example, children need an appreciation of others’ minds to interpret the communicative intentions behind the utterances they hear, and pattern-finding skills are important for the development of linguistic categories. In proposing that the skills needed for language acquisition are domain general, the usage-based approach therefore offers a non-modular view of cognition, in that it does not regard language as being distinct from other cognitive domains.

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