01:185:253 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Elissa L. Newport, Hawaiian Pidgin
9 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
A pidgin consists of largely unstructured strings of words borrowed from a variety of languages used when people speaking different languages must communicate in ports, plantations, etc. Starting in about 1890, workers from many countries (china, japan, philippines, Puerto rico) were brought to hawaii to work the pidgin they used to communicate had no consistent word order, no tenses, no logical markers, no way to distinguish who did what to whom. The children who were surrounded by speakers of hawaiian pidgin grew up speaking a new language, a creole, that had standardized word order and rich grammatical structure invented a new language. Bickerton argues that the new structure in hawaiian creole relied on the innate information about language that the children imposed as they were acquiring their new language: a creole re-created by a single child. Elissa newport and colleagues studied the language development of simon , a profoundly dead boy.
