THE LAD GOES TO SCHOOL - A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR NATIVISTS

Linguistics is supposed to be the study of linguistic competence. The sentences used by linguists to illustrate their arguments are presumab ly, structures that can be generated by the rules that make up the nat ive speaker's competence. Therefore, all normal native speakers should in principle be capable of processing them. In this study, adult resp ondents of various educational backgrounds were presented with a serie s of test sentences based on examples drawn from recent publications i n the GB framework. The rest was carefully designed to minimize the ef fects of extrinsic factors such as memory limitations and lapses of at tention. It was found that performance increased dramatically with edu cational achievement, with the least-educated respondents consistently obtaining very low scores. An analysis of the patterns of answers giv en by respondents of various educational backgrounds revealed that the least-educated speakers were also the most likely to ignore syntactic cues and rely on nonlinguistic strategies in interpreting the test se ntences. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to deal with the c arefully edited highly syntacticized structures that one encounters in publications dealing with language is acquired in the course of forma l education and is far from universal. This in turn raises doubts abou t the traditional ''logical'' argument for innateness.