UNIVERSIDAD DE BELGRANO

FACULTAD DE LENGUAS Y ESTUDIOS EXTRANJEROS

TRADUCTORADO PÚBLICO, LITERARIO Y CIENT. TEC. DE INGLÉS

PROF. ALEJANDRO PARINI

“PIDGINS, CREOLES AND THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS”

SAMANTHA VÁSQUEZ

7517

INTRODUCTION

In this paper I am going to talk about pidgins and creoles from the point of view of language acquisition. Creolistics (short form for pidgin and creole linguistics) have provided some revealing and controversial insights into language evolution, acquisition and use; though disagreements exist over what languages or varieties can be labelled as 'creole' or as 'pidgin', and debate continues over the nature of creolization, the 'life cycle' of pidgins and creoles and the origin of grammatical structures in creoles which are absent in any preceding pidgin.

PIDGIN LANGUAGES

A pidgin language is a language which is based on another language or to be precise on several other languages. A pidgin language develops among people and becomes a means of communication among people who speak different native languages, but in contrast to normal natural languages a pidgin language shows a very poor grammar and a sharply curtailed vocabulary. The major ingredients of a pidgin language come from the native languages of the pidgin speakers. The language with the strongest influence on the pidgin is called the superstrate language and all other contributing languages are called the substrate languages. The vocabulary is mainly drawn from the superstrate language whereas the grammar is a compound product of all involved languages.

Slavery and colonization were a major force for the formation of pidgin languages. For example the slaves taken to America did not necessarily speak the same language but had to communicate with each other. To accomplish this, they invented a pidgin language with English as superstrate language. What is typical for pidgin languages is that their use is highly variable and due to the small vocabulary many concepts are expressed in whole sentences.

By its definition a pidgin language is native to none of its speakers.

CREOLE LANGUAGES

When a pidgin is used in a community and the next generation learns this pidgin as a native language a process called creolization begins. This occurs among the children that receive the pidgin language as their only input and basis for language acquisition. Here a remarkable thing happens, the children do not learn this easy and poor language but they tremendously extend it and transform it into a real natural language with full complexity and a uniform use among its speakers. This newly developed language has a complex grammar and an extended vocabulary. When this Creole adopts more and more features of the superstrate language it becomes a variety of the standard of this superstrate language, this process is called decreolization. If the Creole language develops to a completely new language this process is called hypercreolization. Linguists have noted similarities in grammatical structure among all creole languages around the world. This is remarkable as most of these languages developed totally independent of each other with little or no contact at all. This feature of creole languages suggests that there are biological reasons for this similarity among these languages.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

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 does not occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of language, especially grammatical systems.
The evidence for such a period is limited and support stems largely from theoretical arguments and analogies to other critical periods in biology such as visual development, but nonetheless is widely accepted. The nature of this phenomenon, however, has been one of the most fiercely debated issues in psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general for decades. Some writers have suggested a 'sensitive' or 'optimal' period rather than a critical one; others dispute the causes (physical maturation, cognitive factors). The duration of the period also varies greatly in different accounts. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, states that “acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty and is rare thereafter” (Pinker 1994, p. 298).

PIDGINS, CREOLES AND THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

The form and structure of pidgin languages are very simple. Upon further analysis one can discover that their grammar und usage greatly resembles the language used by Genie1 and that the errors committed by late language learners also seem to be a 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 errors that 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. 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, 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. They start the process of creolization and learn a complex creole language with a uniform grammar across its speakers.

Somehow it seems that the internal constraints on language acquisition have a certain preference for a grammar with the complexity of natural language grammars. This might be due to some internal 'bio program' as proposed by Salikoko Mufwene2 or to the classic idea of a universal grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky3. There is no way to explain how children come to invent such complex grammatical features on their own without having any input as basis. Nevertheless the finding that all creole languages around the world have similarities in their grammatical structure strongly suggests that an internal mechanism, program or constraint is present which drives our language development and this internal structure is only active during the critical period as creole languages are only developed by them. Adults can only produce the simple Pidgins and this has nothing to do with learning a first or a second language. Genie learned English as her first language and nevertheless showed the structural deficits also found for Pidgin languages.

Also the experiments on second language learners conducted by Elissa L. Newport4 in 1990 show that the late learners performed the same error patterns although they had different native languages. The experiment was actually only done on subjects with either Chinese or Korean as native language, but as the same error patterns were also found for late American Sign Language learners I think that the generalization to all second language learners with different native languages could be made.

CONCLUSION

I think that these findings pretty much explain the structure of Pidgin languages. Also the process of creolization is well explained by this. Children are still in their critical period and therefore able to capture complex structures. It seems like this can happen very quickly without any effort on the side of children, suggesting that this is a natural process.

NOTES

1 Genie is the pseudonym for a feral child who spent nearly all of the first thirteen years of her life locked inside a bedroom strapped to a potty chair. She was a victim of one of the most severe cases of social isolation in American history. Genie was discovered by Los Angeles authorities on November 4, 1970.

2 Salikoko Mufwene is a linguist born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the development of creole languages, as well as on African American Vernacular English.

3 Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.

4 Elissa L. Newport is George Eastman Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure.

REFERENCES:

• N. Chomsky (1993). Language and Thought.

• Mari C. Jones and Ishtla Singh. Exploring Language Change

• Mufwene, Salikoko (1990). "Creoles and Universal Grammar". Linguistics 28 (4): 783–787.

• Patricia C. Nichols. Cambridge University Press (1996). Pidgins and Creoles

• Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct