From Ontogenesis to Phylogenesis: What Can Child Language Tell Us About Language Evolution?

There seems to be an irrestible tendency for people to take the child as a model of the primordial state of the species. For the past several centuries, philosophers and psychologists and anthropologists have made analogies between children and animals, children and “primitive ” peoples, and, inevitably, children and our proto-hominid ancestors. Advances in developmental and comparative psychology, along with anthropology, have made the first two analogies untenable. Human children are not the same as mature monkeys and apes, and preliterate societies are not childlike. But in the current scientific fascination with the origin of the species, it has become fashionable again to propose that human children are in some ways models of mature proto- or pre-hominids. Nowhere has this proposal received more circulation than in discussions about the evolution of language (e.g., Bickerton, 1990; Givón, 1998). I suggest that this recent form of the recapitualitionist argument will fail. In its classical version, the proposal was abandoned on the basis of evidence from embryology and physiological development. The current proposal, by contrast, is not compatible with what we know about the psycholinguistic development of human children and the processes of historical development of existing human languages.