Language Acquisition and EcoDevo Processes: The Case of the Lexicon-Syntax Interface
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Language Acquisition and EcoDevo Processes: The Case of the Lexicon‑Syntax Interface Sergio Balari1 · Guillermo Lorenzo2 · Sonia E. Sultan3 Received: 19 January 2020 / Accepted: 8 April 2020 © Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 2020
Abstract Ecological developmental biology (EcoDevo) considers the phenotype as actively produced through an environmentally informed process of individual development, rather than predetermined by the genotype. Accordingly, the genotype is viewed as one among many interactants that contribute formative elements; it is understood to do so no differently from the way other organism-internal and environmental resources do. Although the EcoDevo approach is evidently particularly apt to inform approaches to human development, which mostly takes shape in rich cultural environments, it is remarkable that, at least within some highly influential circles of the linguistic sciences, the study of many distinctive human cognitive traits including language remains strongly anchored to a preformationist stance. This article brings an EcoDevo approach to the biologically focused study of language to argue that an aspect of language design commonly assumed to be “blueprinted,” namely, the lexicon-syntax interface, may instead be explained as a plastic effect of ongoing developmental processes in the mind of the child, in which designated aspects of the environment fulfill a key constructive role. Keywords Biolinguistics · Culture · Developmental plasticity · Ecological developmental biology · Lexicon-syntax interface
Introduction Ecological developmental biology (EcoDevo) stresses the need to move beyond the 20th century understanding of the genotype as an internally self-contained, deterministic developmental “program” (Mayr 1982) with a contemporary model that reflects the environmental context-dependency of phenotypic outcomes (Gilbert and Epel 2009, 2015; Sultan 2015). This altered framework for phenotypic causation has a number of far-reaching implications. To start with, developmental processes are no longer seen merely as a function that directly maps genotypes onto phenotypes (Alberch 1991a; Robert 2004). Instead, the phenotype is understood as actively produced through the process of individual * Guillermo Lorenzo [email protected] 1
Departament de Filologia Catalana, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
2
Departamento de Filología Española, Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain
3
Department of Biology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
development. In this view, the genotype is considered as one among many developmental interactants or resources, contributing constructive materials no differently from the way other internal organismic and external environmental factors do (Griffiths and Gray 1994; Oyama 2000a; Leimar and McNamara 2015). Causal agency is thus distributed among many different elements and lacks any kind of central controller (Sultan 2019). Consequently, no additive causal effect
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