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Cognitive Science Series, 8 Eric Wanner, General Editor Advisory Board Robert Abelson John Anderson Ned Block Daniel Bobrow Gordon Bower Joan Bresnan Ann Brown Roger Brown Susan Carey Wallace Chafe Noam Chomsky Eve Clark Herbert Clark Michael Cole Roy 0'Andrade Donald Davidson Charles Fillmore Jerry Fodor Donald Foss Merrill Garrett Rochel Gelman Lila Gleitman Marshall Haith Gilbert Harman Janellen Huttenlocher Jerome Kagan Daniel Kahneman Ronald Kaplan William Kessen Walter Kintsch Stephen Kosslyn George Miller Donald Norman Daniel Osherson Barbara Hall Partee Hilary Putnam Lee Ross David Rumelhart John Searle Marilyn Shatz Dan Slobin Edward Smith Ann T reisman Amos Tversky David Waltz Patrick Winston Cognitive Science Series 1. Frank C. Keil, Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective 2. Edwin Hutchins, Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study 3. William E. Cooper and Jeanne Paccia-Cooper, Syntax and Speech 4. Edward E. Smith and Douglas L. Medin, Categories and Concepts s. John R. Anderson, The Architecture of C~ognition 6. P. N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness 7. Steven Pinker, Language Learnability and Language Development 8. Barbara Landau and Lila R. Gleitman, Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child Language and Experience Evidence from the Blind Child Barbara Landau and Lila R. Gleitman Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1985 Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Illustrations copyright © 1985 by Robert Thacker All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Landau, Barbara, 1949Language and experience. (Cognitive science series; 8) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Language acquisition. 2. Children, Blind-Language. I. Gleitman, Lila R. II. Title. III. Series. Pl18.L24 1985 401'.9 85-783 ISBN 0-674-51025-9 (alk. paper) To our parents Nora and Manuel Fanny and Ben Preface W e ask in this book how children learn which of the words in their language encode which of the meanings. We accept as self-evident that any explanation of this learning must take nonlinguistic experience as relevant: When children hear words spoken by adults, they also observe objects, scenes, and events. Yet the issues here are quite perplexing because, at least to first inspection, heard words seem to map only very inexactly onto the child's observations of objects, scenes, and events. After all, it must with .some frequency be the case that the child learner is attending to one thing (say, the ice cream on the sideboard) while the mother speaks of something else ("Eat your peas, dear!"). Woe to the learner who takes this particular word-toexperience pair as a basis for reconstructing the meanings conveyed by language. In light of such difficulties, we tried to get some insight into how the child constructs the right mappings between words and the world by examining a situation in which the opportunities to observe the world are diminished: the case of language learning by congenitally blind children. This approach is hardly new. Such philosophers as Locke and Leibniz considered the case of the congenitally blind to be crucial to their epistemological theories. From Locke's perspective, it was clear that the blind should be defective in their understanding of certain words, such as picture or blue, for he held that the concepts they encode can be derived only from specific sensory experience. In contrast, Liebniz held that much of this knowledge arises internally, an