Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, USA, Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs. He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Psychonomic Society. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and environmental constraints in the evolution, acquisition and processing of language. He is the author of over 220 scientific papers and has edited four books. His 2016 book Creating language: Integrating evolution, acquisition, and processing provides a comprehensive overview of his work over the past two decades. Dr. Christiansen’s newest book (to be published February 2022), The Language Game: How improvisation created language and changed the world, shows how language derives from the chaos of improvisation rather than from an in-built language instinct or grammar rules.
Language acquisition is often viewed as a problem of inference, in which the child—like a “mini-linguist”— tries to piece together the abstract grammar of her native language from incomplete and noisy input. This “language-as-knowledge” viewpoint contrasts with a more recent alternative, in which the challenge of language acquisition is practical, not theoretical: by practicing across myriads of social interactions, the child gradually learns to understand and produce language. In this talk, I explore some key implications of this “language-as-skill” framework, focusing on how constraints arising from the need to process language in the here-and-now shape acquisition. I conclude that language acquisition may be best construed as skill learning, on a par with learning other complex human skills such as riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument.
