Resumen de The naturalistic tradition of biolinguistics and the study of child phonology
Modern biolinguistics represents in a broad sense an enterprise in which different disciplines that study language as a natural object subject to empirical scientific research converge. It builds on a long and rich tradition of naturalistic studies of the “science of language” and addresses questions essential to the scientific study of language, such as its phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin and evolution, its use or its relation to mind and action. The biolinguistic approach arose in the context of the “cognitive revolution” in the mid-20th century, as a reaction against the reduction of linguistics to a taxonomic science allied to behaviorism, which denied the possibility of scientific investigation of mental processes. Linguistics, in search of its full autonomy, had refused to explain all the questions that had to do with linguistic change, considering that the dynamic aspects of language were not essential, but accidental. With the explanation of change being the hallmark of empirical science, the “cognitive revolution” was seen as a counter-revolution since it involved a return to the naturalistic tradition of the science of language. It also advocated the study of child language, to which the science of language had historically given increasing significance in explaining linguistic evolution and change. This chapter reviews the naturalistic tradition in the study of child language that preceded the “cognitive revolution” and the subsequent emergence of a line of research that could be framed within the biolinguistic enterprise, focusing primarily on the sound patterns of language that provide empirical evidence of the complex biopsycholinguistic dynamics of language change.
