Universal Grammar - Presence of Creole Languages

Presence of Creole Languages

The presence of creole languages is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by Bickerton's controversial language bioprogram theory. Creoles are languages that are developed and formed when different societies come together and are forced to devise their own system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items known as a pidgin. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speakers and make use of a full grammar.

According to Bickerton, the idea of universal grammar is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all of these languages. For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre-verbal auxiliaries, they uniformly express tense, aspect, and mood. Negative concord occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like Spanish). Another similarity among creoles is that questions are created simply by changing a declarative sentence's intonation, not its word order or content.

However, extensive work by Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar, as has sometimes been supposed. In a series of experiments, Hudson-Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars. Notably, they found that children tend to ignore minor variations in the input when those variations are infrequent, and reproduce only the most frequent forms. In doing so, they tend to standardize the language that they hear around them. Hudson-Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin situation (and in the real life situation of a deaf child whose parents were disfluent signers), children are systematizing the language they hear based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not, as has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar. Further, it seems unsurprising that creoles would share features with the languages they are derived from and thus look similar "grammatically."