First Syntax, Adjectives and Colors

A long-standing question in language development research concerns the contrast between early word learning and the learning of adjectives. The difficulty children experience early on in the acquisition of color terms, for example, led Darwin to speculate that children are initially color blind. Adjectives, in fact, are almost entirely missing in early productive vocabularies across languages. Despite the accounts proposed to explain the phenomena the debate continues to be far from being resolved. We believe adjective learning requires the development of two basic abilities. The first one is at a syntactic level: the comprehension of utterances with adjectives entails a proto-syntactic ability in discriminating the different roles of two words, by virtue of their sequence. The second is at a semantic level, which entails understanding the predicative function of the adjective, against the more basic mapping of sounds with whole objects. Both abilities develop as a result of the synergy between learning from progressive exposure to a language rich environment and the maturation of neural structures. The “visual diet” also influences the type of adjectives learned, this being particularly pertinent to what color terms are learned. This chapter will discuss neurocomputational models that have in part simulated neural processes behind the learning of adjectives in linguistic development; how an initial sensitivity to word-order (leading to early syntactic learning or what we call proto-syntactic ability) might develop through linguistic exposure and brain maturational processes; and how both exposure to language as well as the range of colors dominant in a particular natural environment might influence not only how color terms are learned, but how colors are perceived, a topic that is right at the center of the historic linguistic relativity debate.