ABSTRACT
In a chapter discussing the recent major shift in the way language and language development have been viewed, child language researcher Evans (2007) wrote:
Since the late 1950s the dominant metaphor for language and cognition has been the digital computer and the belief that human intelligence is a process of computations on symbolic representations-rule-based manipulation of symbols. Language, from this perspective, is a symbolic system that is innate, residing in the human genetic code. As a result, the focus of much language research has been on the universal, stable, orderly, stage-like patterns in learners’ language and the discovery of these innate abstract linguistic structures.
