How is the complex morphosyntax linguistics describes actually learned? In his latest book (1) Jean-Adolphe Rondal, professor emeritus at the University of Liège, casts doubt upon “innatist” theories that postulate the existence of a “universal grammar” of some kind. Based on many empirical observations, he has elaborated a different theory which opens up a large area for future research in psycholinguistics.

Jean-Adolphe Rondal begins by studying the production of spoken language and the process of its being learned. Up to now no satisfying explanation has been given for the psychological mechanisms that allow human beings to integrate the components that govern the organization of sentences longer than one word, which require precise sequential organization. Two theses are developed, in the first part.  According to one of these the grammatical categories used by linguists to describe languages have no psychological reality at the level of habitual users of language. The uncritical transposition of those categories into psycholinguistics has led to an explanatory impasse. The second thesis maintains that the emergence of combinatory regulations (this expression replaces talk of morphosyntax) in a child’s development is the result of neurogenetic and cognitive influences, and thus language learning is largely implicit.

“When we produce sentences in language,” says Rondal, “language itself is organized according to sequential arrangements that are largely associative, involving things that are near each other in the sentence and things that are further away. It’s not a question of structures that lie at some “depth” or that would come to the surface, as in theories of generative grammar (linked in history with the work of the American linguist Noam Chomsky), rather what is involved are arrangements and sequences that take place from the beginning to the end of a sentence – to draw an analogy with writing, arrangements that go from left to right. The human brain is perfectly organised as a result of this, and this is demonstrated more and more each day in basic neurological research (cf. the recent synthesis by Michael Gazzaniga on this point (2).”

The author pursues these ideas through three chapters, closing with a synthesis of main points. The reader is first given a description of capacities that are innately useful, or are assigned to language by the human infant. Acquired competences are then enumerated, and the method of learning children use is deduced from that.