An ecological approach to language development: an alternative functionalism.

I argue for a new functionalist approach to language development, an ecological approach. A realist orientation is used that locates the causes of language development neither in the child nor in the language environment but in the functioning of perceptual systems that detect language-world relationships and use them to guide attention and action. The theory requires no concept of innateness, thus avoiding problems inherent in either the innate ideas or the genes-as-causal-programs explanations of the source of structure in language. An ecological explanation of language is discussed in relation to concepts and language, language as representation, problems in early word learning, metaphor, and syntactic development. Finally, problems incurred in using the idea of innateness are summarized: History prior to the chosen beginning point is ignored, data on organism-environment mutuality are not collected, and the explanation claims no effect of learning, which cannot be tested empirically.