Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [238]
John is easy to please.
John is eager to please.
The sentences have the same surface structure, but if you try to paraphrase them in the same fashion, only one makes sense:
It is easy to please John.
It is eager to please John.
No child makes such an error; every child comprehends the deep structure. “John” in the first sentence is the deep object of “please,” so the paraphrase works; “John” in the second sentence is the deep subject of “please,” so that any paraphrase has to take the form “John is eager to please (someone).” An understanding of deep structure is not learned from surface structure or from rules of thumb; the ability to perceive it is innate. (Neither Chomsky nor any other psycholinguist, however, says that language itself is innate, but only that the child has an innate predisposition to recognize and interpret the deeper structure of sentences.)
In recent studies of creoles—languages that have evolved from the mixing of existing languages—the linguist Derek Bickerton has found that creoles formed in different parts of the world are more similar to each other in grammatical structure than to long-lived languages. He also has claimed that pidgin—an informal first-generation creole that lacks consistent grammatical rules—tends to become more developed and grammatical when spoken by the children whose parents speak it. Both bodies of evidence, according to Bickerton, are evidence of the brain’s built-in sense of grammar.33
Intellectual development: Often ploddingly but sometimes inventively, researchers have devised experimental techniques better than Piaget’s and, as noted, produced a substantial number of modifications and a few outright rejections of parts of his work. Some examples:
—Heart rhythms of babies as young as four months increase when an object disappears and also when it reappears, indicating surprise. This suggests that, contrary to Piaget’s doctrine, babies expect objects to continue to exist.34 (But it is still true that they seem to forget about an object as soon as it has disappeared.)
—Piaget tested children for “conservation of number” (the ability to recognize that, say, six closely grouped objects are as many as six spaced ones), and concluded that they did not attain it until the stage of concrete operations, at about seven. But later researchers used different experimental methods, such as Rochel Gelman’s “magic” procedure, in which one of a small set of toy mice on a plate is surreptitiously removed or an extra one added while the plate is covered. Children of five or even less recognize that there are fewer or more, and say that one has been taken away or added.35
—Researchers studying children’s ability to take another person’s view have used more naturalistic methods than Piaget’s mountain experiment. Instead of asking questions about what things look like from a different perspective, they let the children talk to different people about the workings of a toy. Surprisingly, even a four-year-old will use short and simple sentences when talking to a two-year-old but longer and more complex ones when talking to an adult. Indeed, the latest work on “theory of mind”—the child’s recognition that other people have their own reasons for what they do, based on their own perspective and experience—shows that children become aware of this quite early in life: They begin to read others’ intentions in their first year of life and are good at doing so by the end of the second year. Preschoolers, it is now clear, are far less egocentric and far more capable of taking another person’s perspective than Piaget thought. The evidence is derived not only from observations of children’s behavior but from physiological evidence: