Eric Heinz Lenneberg (19 September 1921 – 31 May 1975) was a
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
and
neurologist who pioneered ideas on
language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...
and
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness.
Life and career
He was born in
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...
, Germany. Ethnically
Jewish, he left
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
because of rising
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
persecution
Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another individual or group. The most common forms are religious persecution, racism, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these term ...
. He initially fled to Brazil with his family and then to the United States where he attended the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
and
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
. A professor of
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
and
neurobiology, he taught at the
Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...
, the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
in Ann Arbor and
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
and Medical School.
Lenneberg's 1964 paper "The Capacity of Language Acquisition," originally published in 1960, sets forth seminal arguments about the human-specific biological capacity for language, which were then being developed in his research and discussions with
George A. Miller,
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, and others at
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
and
MIT, and popularized by
Steven Pinker in his book, ''
The Language Instinct''. He presents four arguments for biological innateness of psychological capacities, parallel to arguments in biology for the innateness of physical traits:
* Universal appearance of a trait at a single time across a species. "Species typical" traits.
* Universal appearance across time for a group. Not just an artifact of cultural history. Again, "species typical" diagnostic feature.
* No learning of the trait is possible.
* Individual development of a trait rigidly follows a given schedule regardless of the particular experience of the organism.
In his publication ''Biological Foundations of Language'' he advanced the
hypothesis
A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obse ...
of a
critical period for language development; a topic which remains controversial and the subject of debate. Lenneberg's biological approach to language was related to developments such as the
motor theory of speech perception
The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally cl ...
developed by
Alvin Liberman
Alvin Meyer Liberman (; May 10, 1917 – January 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception.
Biography
Liberman rece ...
and colleagues at
Haskins Laboratories and also provided historical antecedents to issues now emerging in
embodied philosophy and
embodied cognition
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognit ...
.
Lenneberg reargued extensively against the psychological implications of the work of
Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf, specifically in regards to the
idea that language influences thought. Lenneberg's argument against this notion was that 'linguistic and non-linguistic events must be separately observed and described before they can be correlated.'
Affiliations
Lenneberg was quite involved in the scientific community, as he was a member of
Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...
,
Sigma Xi, the Linguistic Society of America, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[Neisser, U., Tapper, D., Gibson, E.J. Eric H. Lenneberg, Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/17927/Lenneberg_Eric_H_1975.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y)]
Education
He attended primary school in Düsseldorf, Germany until 1933, when he moved to Brazil. In 1949, he received a B.A. from the University of Chicago. Lenneberg then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology and Linguistics from Harvard in 1956.
References
Bibliography
* ''Biological Foundations of Language''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967.
* ''The Capacity of Language Acquisition'' in Fodor and Katz, 1964. Fodor, Jerry and Jerrold Katz, eds. 1964.
* ''The Structure of Language''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. The Fodor & Katz volume is a collection of papers around early Chomskyan linguistics, phonology, grammar, semantics.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lenneberg, Eric
1921 births
1975 deaths
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
American cognitive scientists
Developmental psycholinguists
University of Chicago alumni
Harvard University alumni
University of Michigan faculty
Harvard Medical School faculty
Cornell University faculty
German expatriates in Brazil