I was inspired by the fact that of the two responses to the discussion, yours and mine thus far, both independently centered upon Jerome Bruner’s LASS. Your experiences with young children and communication gives empirical support to Bruner’s ideas about the importance of interaction in language acquisition.
In my research, I decided to look a little deeper into Jerome Bruner and was very pleased to find an interview of Jerome Bruner at 99 years old in 2014. The sparkle in his eye and enthusiasm is all there and is inspiring.
In the description, it reveals that he “enacted Piaget’s developmental stages in the classroom”, which helps explain to me why I felt an affinity to Piaget as well as Bruner. He seems to be a bridge between Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Piaget’s developmental stages by allowing for the students to self-learn, which Piaget emphasized and the teacher’s role, which Vygotsky emphasized. This nuanced family of ideas which all seem so similar and I’m drawn to also helps me see why I see Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device as being so far away from that, even though it’s certainly valuable.
Chomsky if I remember right was heavily involved in the earliest of AI. He was working with mainframes in the mid 1950s which seem to have inspired his early ideas on language acquisition. It was far away historically from connectionism which wouldn’t gain roots until the mid 1980s after languishing decades from the Perceptron idea of the late 1950s. The idea of “self-assembling” intelligence would be strange to Chomsky and he considered our crop of Large Language Models (spawning from Google’s “Attention is all you need!” paper in 2017) to be tricks of statistical prediction, lacking our deep understanding of structure and grammar which seem to precede human language production. But perhaps “tricks” is what it is, and is what we have and is what we do.
I don’t know what “primes” our human capability for language entirely. It certainly seems like a dance of some kind between different factors. Work such as what you do in interacting with small children as a teacher I believe is crucial for language development. I agree with you that “language… is built by our personal experiences” and Bruner’s view seems to be a reasonably stable and supportable view.
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