sampson : educating eve g . sampson , ( 1997 ) educating eve : the language instinct debate , cassell , london , 184pp . reviewed by feargal murphy , university college dublin . the rise of generative linguistics in 60s gave a new lease of life to the old nature vs . nurture debate . the behaviourist model of language was judged a failure at explaining the process of language acquisition and a new theory of language acquisition emerged . it was rooted in the philosophy of descartes in the 17th century as well as humboldt and , ultimately , plato . it came to be known as linguistic nativism or rationalist linguistics and is most associated with noam chomsky . the central tenet of this theory is that children are born with some kind of language acquisition device already in place in their brains which allows them to acquire the language of their environment . within linguistic nativism there has been some debate as to whether this device provides merely general rules that allow for the acquisition of language or whether it is a rich innate system that provides a complete basis for language acquisition so that a child can acquire the complexities of a language at a time when its general cognitive development could not possibly cope with such complexity . the rationalist tradition behind linguistic nativism has always been in contrast with empiricism which states that all ideas and knowledge ( including knowledge of language ) come from experience obtained through the senses and that there can be no innate knowledge . a view that goes back to the 17th century and the writings of locke , berkeley and hume and in the modern era has also been associated with the philosophers of the vienna circle and karl popper . _ educating eve _ will certainly not determine the outcome of the nature vs . nurture debate , nor will it , in my opinion , lead to any productive insight into the debate . the book fails to understand the scope and import of the nativist arguments and consequently falls short of presenting a genuine criticism of it . as it stands the book will be applauded by those who are already favourably disposed towards its conclusions and derided by those who are not . _ educating eve _ ( henceforth _ ee _ ) argues against the writings of chomsky , as well as pinker 's ' the language instinct ' , bickerton 's ' language and species ' and jackendoff 's ' patterns in the mind ' . these three books are essentially aimed at the general rather than the specialist reader . the result of targeting these three books is to make the arguments against nativism appear weak and superficial . the desire to rescue public opinion from the wrong path is a recurring theme in the author 's work . in his _ language and liberty _ , which also argued for a non-nativist view of language , the main aim was to discourage people from following left wing politics . the author 's politics , unfortunately , emerge as a strong force in this book . given the importance of the nativism debate i shall focus primarily on the more important linguistic issues , leaving aside politics except when they cloud the issues surrounding nativism the alternative to nativism that this book argues for is essentially a version of karl popper 's empiricism . according to this view the ability to learn may be innate but there are no domain specific innate mechanisms involved in learning . people learn the language of the community they belong to in the same way that they learn anything else , by trial and error . they ' make original though fallible conjectures and test them against objective reality ' ( p . 137 - all quotes are from _ ee _ unless otherwise indicated ) . eventually , using this method , each individual comes to learn a language . what they learn are ' wholly cultural constructs ' ( p . 137 ) , an e - language rather than an i - language , to use chomsky 's terminology . note that the conception of language in _ ee _ is totally different from those of chomsky , jackendoff , bickerton or pinker . for these nativists , language cannot belong to a society rather than to the individual . this issue is not actually addressed in the book . _ ee _ merely states that language is a cultural artifact and not biological , but does not furnish any evidence for this claim . the book also states popper 's belief that the mind is not amenable to scientific theorising ( p . 138 ) . i am unable to find any evidence in the book to support this claim . however , if one assumes that the mind is outside the domain of scientific inquiry then it simply becomes impossible to engage in a debate about the merits of the specifics of any nativist theory . the first task this book undertakes is to demolish chomsky 's arguments for nativism ( only sourcing material up to 1991 ) and then to demolish the 's econd wave ' nativists - with pinker foremost in the second wave . the book utilises many arguments , some more noteworthy than others , and it would be beyond the scope of this review to examine them all . i will look at a few of the arguments , more or less at random . the arguments against chomsky centre on what sampson perceives as the basis of nativism : 1 : speed of acquisition 2 : age - dependence 3 : poverty of data 4 : convergence among grammars 5 : language universals 6 : species - specificity _ ee _ claims the first argument ( speed of acquisition ) is hollow as there is no way of determining what exactly 's peed ' could be in this area . however , it seems uncontroversial enough that children acquire language faster than adults and that they do so without the problems that adults encounter . there is no attempt in the book to address the notion of whether different languages are acquired at different speeds or whether different children acquiring the same language do so in radically different sequences . this would seem to be a distinct possibility if we do not have an innate language specific faculty but rather rely on some generalised learning mechanism . a look at the evidence regarding language acquisition across languages would have helped make the case conclusive . the book should have dealt more with data available in order to show that only a non-nativist account of language acquisition could capture the facts . instead _ ee _ relies on the notion that the popperian account can cope just as well as a nativist account and is closer to the ' common sense ' view of language . but this does not prove that a popperian account is right . chomsky 's second argument ( age - dependence ) is dismissed because , the book states , humans can learn language at any age " if they see the task as worthwhile " ( p . 36 ) . however , the author does not describe any procedure for assessing the worthwhileness of the task . why a child would find it worthwhile to learn a language when its needs are being met by compliant adults responding to non-linguistic communication is not addressed . if the early vocalisations of children are evidence of the beginnings of language acquisition , then the child is deciding at a very early age that language is ' worthwhile ' , at a stage when it seems difficult to believe the child is weighing up any options to see what may or may not be worthwhile . following this logic we could extend the criterion of " worthwhileness " to other ' learning ' such as ' learning to walk ' and eliminate the innate component from that as well . the book states that there are " plenty of cases on record of adults mastering a second language to native-speaker standard apart from accent " ( p . 36 ) ; i am not quite sure what it might mean to achieve native-speaker standard apart from accent . what the book suggests - without providing any crucial evidence - - is that " learning as a general process is for biological reasons far more rapid before puberty than after " ( p . 37 ) . this is supposed to show that age dependence is not proof of a critical period for language acquisition using some innate language acquisition device - - a critical period being one of the features that is characteristic of innate behaviour . the age dependence , according to the book , falls out from the slowing down of the learning process in general after puberty . this , however , seems to contradict the other argument against age dependence ; that an adult can master a second language to native speaker standard . the author also states that " susan curtiss herself regarded genie as refuting the strong version of lenneberg 's claim , that natural language acquisition cannot occur after puberty " ( p . 37 ) . susan curtiss might want to respond to that one herself . my understanding of her work on genie is that genie did have language ( that is , rule-governed creative linguistic behaviour ) but was not able to achieve anything close to native speaker competence while under observation ( curtiss , p . 204 ) even though it would indeed have been ' worthwhile ' to do so . furthermore her linguistic development did not follow the same course as children acquiring language normally . this suggests that genie 's ability to learn language was diminished due to her age but the important point is that her cognitive development in other areas seemed not to be so affected . it would also have been worthwhile for chelsea to have learned language , yet chelsea did not achieve native speaker standard ( see jackendoff 's _ patterns in the mind _ ) . the third argument presented by chomsky for nativism , according to the book , is poverty of data during acquisition . the arguments against chomsky presented in the book do not bear close scrutiny . according to the book , motherese provides a " graded series of language lessons " ( p . 39 ) and is not at all degenerate , as the poverty of data argument states . this is not particularly new ( the references cited by the author are from the early 70s ) . the fact is , however , that we really do not yet know what role - if any - motherese plays in learning / acquiring a language . but one thing worth noting is that there is no language teaching theory that proposes that adults could be most effectively taught a second language through being taught in motherese . it is also true that there do not yet exist conclusive studies on the universality of motherese ( although the wide variety of language groups studied show a high degree of similarity ) . in some cultures motherese seems to play less of a role and is different to the motherese we see in the english speaking world . in fact motherese or child directed speech seems not to make the task of learning / acquiring language all that much easier but what it does is allow for a high degree of socialisation . this can be seen in the fact that the simplification of structure decreased greatly when the parent and child were no longer in the presence of the observer but merely being taped . the motherese wa s not for the benefit of the child only . of course , if language is not in any way innate we are left with the problem of explaining how child directed speech is so perfectly a " graded series of language lessons " for the infant , despite the fact that adults are not taught how to give language lessons , perhaps empiricist would have to say that the ability to give " a graded series of lessons " in language is innate . the author states that a popperian account of language learning would allow for a child to determine the general principles from the input ( as it would for an adult who wants to learn a language ) . this is important as the nativist account holds that the basic principles of language are innate and thus are available for use in determining what is going on in the language input . individuals learning a language via a popperian method would use their learning abilities to work out the general principles from the input without any of these principles being already available in the head . but what are we to make of cases of * specific language impairment * where the rate of learning / acquisition a language seems different from other areas of learning ? the whole basis of a popperian analysis is that language acquisition is not different from any other domain where learning occurs . consequently , it predicts that there could be no difference between the acquisition of language and learning in other cognitive domains . this prediction runs counter to reported facts as clearly presented in yamada 's 1990 book ' laura : a case study for the modularity of language ' . in arguing against chomsky , the author takes chomsky 's much used example of english speaking children determining how to ask yes / no questions . he is seeking to show that chomsky is being dishonest in his analysis by not verifying the data . a child working out how to make a yes / no question in english has to work out that if any verb is to be moved it has to be the verb in the main clause and not just the first verb encountered in the sentence . to work this out , a child has to distinguish between verbs and other words and also between main verbs and auxiliary verbs as well as knowing the structure of the phrases in the sentence . then the child has to work out that auxiliary verbs in the main clause can move to the beginning of the sentence but that main verbs appear in the infinitive while a tensed 'd o ' occurs at the beginning of the sentence . chomsky 's point is that children learn to make these distinctions and move the appropriate verb from the appropriate position to form a yes / no question with great ease . both the author and chomsky agree on the analysis of the rule involved in forming a yes / no question but where they differ is in their belief about the * exposure * of children to yes / no questions where the main clause is not the first clause in the sentence but rather a subordinate clause appears first , as in : is the man who is talking to bill wearing gloves ? chomsky 's claim is that a child may not encounter such a question in the language s / he hears before determining the rule of yes / no question formation . _ ee _ argues that such sentences are indeed present in the language that children hear . what the book actually has to prove is that all children hear this crucial form of yes / no question before they determine the yes / no question formation rule . this is not shown but instead it is argued that such structures are available to children who read ; but children who do n't read learn language as well . indeed it is quite possible that children form the rule about yes / no question formation before the ever learn to read . the author claims that he shows that chomsky is ' wildly mistaken ' ( p . 42 ) , he paraphrases the situation as follows : " . . the man who is the world 's leading living intellectual , according the cambridge university a second plato is basing his radical reassessment of human nature largely on the claim that a certain thing never happens ; he tells us that it strains his credulity to think that it might happen , but he has never looked , and people who have looked find that it happens a lot . " ( p . 42-43 ) the people who have looked are sampson himself and geoff pullum ( p . 42 ) but they have only checked sources of written language but as i have said this ignores the fact that illiterate children can also speak . in fact , so enamoured is the author with the written word that he argues that , historically , hypotaxis emerges as literacy develops . somehow the organisation involved in writing leads to great leaps forward in language . he does finally admit that there is no great research on this topic but blames linguistics departments for this ( " this is not a popular topic of research in linguistics departments " , p . 75 ) . there is nothing to prevent the taping of the speakers of modern pre-literate languages - if one can find any cultures that could be classed as pre-literate without any qualifications - in order to test for the occurrence of hypotaxis but the author does n't seem to have u ndertaken this task . the book does n't opt fully for the idea that there was little or no hypotaxis in the languages of ancient pre-literate cultures as the author states , hedging his bets : " if there was little or no hypotaxis in these languages " [ the hebrew of the old testament etc . ] " that is a real difference between them and more recent languages " . ( p . 75 ) for obvious reasons we can never answer the question of whether or not there was hypotaxis in hebrew before writing or indeed while writing was still a fairly recent innovation . it is true that serious investigation into parataxis and subordination in various languages has been carried out and goes back over one hundred years . the book claims that " it was a cliche of late nineteenth century linguistics that the early stages of languages with a long recorded history showed a development from what was called parataxis to hypotaxis " ( p . 74 ) . it cites great linguists like karl brugmann , hermann paul and eduard hermann as support for the notion that languages go from a paratactic stage to a hypotactic stage . but there are two problems with this . firstly , not all nineteenth century linguists would have been happy with the notion that hypotaxis emerged as writing developed . hermann jacobi 's 1897 work ' composition und nebensatz ' concluded that " maori , like early stages of pie may not have had contained a relative particle " in subordination ( lehmann , p . 60 ) . so jacobi is claiming that pie did have subordination which is the basis of hypotaxis for brugmann , paul and hermann . secondly , there is really no reason to believe that nineteenth century linguists got everything right in comparative and historical linguistics . the idea that hypotaxis emerged from a previous stage must be seen alongside other ideas in nineteenth century linguistics about the development of languages from primitive systems to more complex systems . the fourth argument the book looks at is convergence among grammars - the notion that people of varying levels of intelligence and exposure to different language inputs , converge on the same grammar . the book claims ( p . 46 ) that chomsky has admitted that educated people may know their mother tongue better . this does not fit in with an i - language approach and so is obviously not representative of chomsky 's theory of language . an i - language approach excludes the possibility of a mother tongue ( an e - language ) that people have mastered to varying degrees . for chomsky such things as english or hungarian or swahili do not exist in any meaningful way . this is controversial , but the point is that for chomsky there is no mother tongue divorced from an individual 's knowledge of it . the second line of argument identified by sampson is that people do not actually converge on the same grammar as they give different grammatical judgments in response to the same data . the book refers to labov 's work - presented in austerlitz ( 1974 ) - where respondents varied in their judgments about the grammaticality of presented sentences . the really interesting thing here is that the people taking the test understood the instructions - oral and written - which they were given concerning the test . it is hard to see how they could all have the same understanding of what was said to them unless they had pretty much the same grammars . the language that was used in their instructions would most likely have contained a variety of syntactic constructions , but there are no reports of the people completing the test remarking on the ungrammaticality of any of the instructions they were given . it is easy to find people varying in groups and even as individuals over time when you ask them to assess sentences such as : ' every one of the boys did n't go there ' . the fact that individuals will differ in their judgment over time shows that what is being tested is not the individual 's competence because an adult 's competence does not vary - although their performance might . a large number of factors determine whether an individual would judge a sentence like the one given above as perfectly grammatical or borderline or totally ungrammatical . but the fact that there is a variation in the reported judgments does not in fact constitute an argument against convergence among grammars it is not a test of grammars but rather a test of performance . intuitions about sentences involving scope relations of quantifiers and negation vary because of the many factors that bear on performance . the book also contends ( pp . 107 - 137 ) that the existence of language universals can be explained by the fact that a popperian learning system will automatically yield such universals . they are not the result of the nature of the language faculty but instead derive from the popperian system of learning . again , the author does not show that a popperian account is better than a nativist account at capturing the facts . if the case against nativism is to be proven , then those language universals that we can agree to exist must be explicable either within a popperian system * only * or at least they should be explained better by a popperian learning theory . the book does not do this . the book targets pinker 's ' the language instinct ' . why sampson decides to devote so much effort to the book is somewhat puzzling . pinker 's book is aimed at a fairly general audience and as such is not really a worthwhile target . among the arguments against pinker we find the assumption that surnames are actual words in individual languages . this means that the existence of a person in england with 's ri ' as the first three letters in his surname means that 's ri ' is a possible initial consonant cluster in english ( p . 83 ) . the author also can't resist taking a pot-shot at what he imagines pinker 's political views to be . the tone of his response to pinker is one of condescension which can be irritating and detracts from any points that the author may be trying to make as well as being irrelevant to the substantive issues . but the worst attack is saved for bickerton . the book seeks to portray him as an intellectual lightweight in a most unappealing way ( p . 76 ) : " [ bickerton 's ] stuff must be a real hit with green students on hawaii " . it is surely not too much to expect that personal abuse would be kept out of the realm of intellectual debate . the book also takes on jackendoff stating that jackendoff writes well : " jackendoff is one of the best writers among the linguistic nativists " ( p . 76 ) , but not forgiving him for being a nativist . " if jackendoff reaches for the word ' instinct ' so hastily in these cases , how can we trust him to use the word judiciously where there are real questions to be resolved " ( p . 79 ) . the main issue picked up on in jackendoff 's work relates to sign language . at one stage the author says ( arguing against jackendoff 's analysis of universal grammar ) : " jackendoff has shortly beforehand pointed out that one aspect of american sign language grammar is not paralleled in any spoken language . the sign-language equivalent of the third person pronouns ( she , they , his ) consists of gesturing ( with hand shapes and movements that depend on whether the reference is singular , plural or possessive ) to locations in the signing space which have been assigned to successive topics of conversations . ' the effect is that there are as many different third-person pronouns available as there are discernible locations in the signing space ' . no spoken language has a pronoun system remotely like this , so how can it be part of our innate knowledge . " ( p . 78 ) the author is missing the point here . sign language expresses person , number , gender and possession as spoken language does and not some other features not found in spoken language . so the system the same as spoken language . the use of pronouns in sign language is exactly the same as the use of pronouns in spoken language and is based on universal grammar , what is different is the modality . the availability of the signing space means that a signer can introduce a greater number of pronouns into the discourse as each pronoun can be allocated a location in the signing space without leading to any confusion . this is the same as the fact that i could use as many second person singular pronouns as i wanted as long as i looked at the individual that i was addressing with that pronoun . looking at the person that i was referring to with the pronoun is really the same as the signer using the sign space to tag pronouns . this is not just true of second person pronouns . i could be talking about , say , the members of a football team and refer to each individual using a third person pronoun . i could be quite clear in my own head who is being picked out each time , it would just be confusing to the person i was talking to . this is because there would be no way for them to distinguish the referents of each of the pronouns . in sign language i can exploit the possibility of the signing space by tagging each meaning of a pronoun with a location in space so that the whole thing does not get confusing . the potential in both oral and sign language is the same , but sign can exploit the signing space in a way that oral language cannot . the point is that the limitations are not imposed by language but by the modality . what jackendoff is saying is that the same universal grammar underlies language no matter what the modality . the last chapter in the book ( ' the creative mind ' ) presents sampson 's view of popper . it is not without problems and the author devotes much time to arguing that popper did n't always mean what he said and that sampson 's analysis of popper is the best . however , the crucial lines in the chapter for the purposes of nature vs . nurture are : " minds are not a topic open to scientific theorising . " ( p . 139 ) and " the position adopted in this book is that conscious human minds are not physical entities . talking about minds is not a way of talking about high-level aspects of brain functioning . minds and bodies are different and separate things which act on one another . " ( p . 138 ) for all those people who believe that minds are indeed a topic open to scientific theorising this will render anything else the book has to say suspect . modern nativists ( as well as most non-nativists ) view the mind as amenable to scientific theorising . for chomsky there is no other possible way to study the mind ( chomsky 1993 , 1995 ) . it is hard to see how a significant debate can take place between two such opposite points of view . the author is committed to the cause of a popperian analysis of language learning / acquisition but will never be able to convert a nativist to his way of thinking until he can gain an understanding of the motivations for adopting a nativist position or reconcile himself with the possibility that nativism may be a stance that an intelligent person can adopt . the author seems to imagine himself fighting a rear guard action against the hordes of misguided nativists who , as he sees it , are close to winning the hearts and minds of the masses . one important aspect of this book is that it can be read as a means of testing how one feels about linguistic nativism . unfortunately for sampson 's crusade , it had the effect of making me prefer the nativist analysis even more than before . ( more background information about the author , geoffrey sampson , and the book ' educating eve ' is available at : http : / / www . grs . u-net . com / ) bibliography : r . austerlitz ( ed ) ( 1974 ) , the scope of american linguistics , peter de ridder press . n . chomsky ( 1993 ) , " naturalism and dualism in the study of language " , international journal of philosophical studies , 2 ( 2 ) : 181 - 209 . n . chomsky ( 1995 ) , " language and nature " , mind , 104 ( 403 ) : 1 - 61 . s . curtiss ( 1977 ) , genie : a psycholinguistic study of a modern day " wild child " , academic press . p . fletcher and b . macwhinney ( eds ) ( 1995 ) , the handbook of child language , blackwell . w . p . lehmann ( 1974 ) , proto - indo - european syntax , university of texas press . g . sampson ( 1979 ) , liberty and language , oup . g . sampson ( 1980 ) , schools of linguistics , hutchinson . j . yamada ( 1990 ) , laura : a case for the modularity of language , mit press . feargal murphy , lecturer in the department of linguistics , university college dublin . http : / / www . ucd . ie / ~ linguist / gogs2 . html