The Creolization of Pidgin: A Connectionist Exploration

Javier Marín Serrano, Javier Valenzuela Manzanares and Francisco Calvo Garzón
Universidad de Murcia

Pidgins are made-up languages which lack many features of natural languages. Children exposed to a Pidgin environment develop as their first language a Creole; a full-fledged language that exhibits the full variety of features that the majority of languages share. According to Bickerton (1984), Creole languages reflect innate Chomskian linguistic structures.

The process of expansion by means of which a Pidgin develops into a Creole is to be explained on a genetically-based universal grammar, and does not depend upon the "superstrate languages" that children may be exposed toi.e., the natural languages that may be spoken in their community. In this paper we propose to review the Pidgin/Creole debate under the light of Connectionist theory. For methodological reasons, we ran three sets of simulations, approaching the issue in a incremental manner: First (i), we trained a number of simple recurrent networks (SRNs)Elman, 1990on a prediction task. The SRNs were exposed to a pidgin-like toy language. Unsurprisingly, no significant grammatical categories emerged, given the empoverished pidgin input. In a second phase (ii), the networks were trained on a mixture of Pidgin and different Superstrate languages, respectively. The networks were then tested on novel Pidgin and Superstrate
sentences. Creolization was assumed to take place when the network predicts a Pidgin lexical item as a next item in a (Superstrate-like) grammatically complex input sequence. In the final stage (iii), networks were exposed to a mixture of Pidgin, Superstrate languages and Creole. Comparing competency in prediction across networks, we suggest, may shed light on the issue of whether Creole languages reflect universal linguistic principles. By reading grammatical competency off the prediction task in terms of the statistical regularities in the linguistic pool of data, Bickerton's position may be challenged.

References

Bickerton, Derek (1984) "The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis" The Behavioral And Brain Sciences 7, pp. 173-221.

Elman, Jeff (1990) "Finding Structure in Time" Cognitive Science 14, pp. 179-211.

Marcus, Gary (2001). The Algebraic Mind. Cambridge (Mass): The MIT Press