Re: Human language acquisition

Fred Mailhot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> Incidentally, for the benefit of the OP and the initial question...the
> following book will have some useful information:
> 
> Bishop D. and Mogford K. (eds.) (1988) Language development in exceptional
> circumstances. Edinburgh ; New York : Churchill Livingstone.
> 
> P 118 L265 1988
> 
> 
> It includes among other things discussion language acquisition in
> congenitally blind children (which has always been an amazing thing to me,
> since we learn the meaning of nouns by ostension, generally), and will
> probably have stuff to say on "non-producing" children...

I suppose we have at least a motor-tactical and haptic sense modality
in addition to vision which may act as a rich substrate for
construction of the semantic classes associated with nouns in natural
language. It may be argued that the severely diminished sensory
processing will result in qualitatively inferior common sense
conception of the very same concepts, however there is firstly the
alternative sensory construction mentioned above and secondly the
abstract acquisition of semantics. A sufficiently advanced common
sense should also contain the facility for abstract construction of
new concepts without requiring sensory perception. How else do we
learn about mathematical ideas and such? We cannot claim that these
ideas are conveyed solely by text which consists of strings of arcane
mathematical symbols. The semantics comes from augmenting our
intuition with new procedures and theoretical models. Likewise, the
blind child has to construct the semantics of many nouns as if reading
from a novel of a fantastic land filled with entities which bear
descriptions alien to our senses and culture, yet are adequately
detailed for us to draw mental images (not necessarily visual!)