Recent evidence against the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis: The pivotal case of Hawai'i Creole

Abstract

Referring to recent sociohistorical and comparative linguistic research on Hawai'i Creole, this article critically examines the four main tenets of Derek Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis: (1) that creoles were created in one generation with only a rudimentary pidgin as input for first language acquisition; (2) that children had to go beyond the input to come up with a fully fledged language; (3) that widely distributed creole languages are virtually identical in particular linguistic features; and (4) that these features did not come from creole speakers' ancestral languages. The article concludes that creole languages do not provide evidence for innate specific linguistic knowledge; however, they are theoretically interesting in what they can reveal about language acquisition with diverse input.