Editing Universal grammar (section)

== Presence of creole languages ==
The presence of [[creole language]]s is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by [[Derek Bickerton|Bickerton's]] [[language bioprogram theory]]. Creole languages develop and form when disparate societies with no common language come together and are forced to devise a new system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items, known as [[pidgin]]. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a [[creole language]]. Unlike pidgins, creole languages have [[native speaker]]s (those with language acquisition from early childhood) and make use of a full, systematic grammar.

Bickerton claims the fact that certain features are shared by virtually all creole languages supports the notion of a universal grammar. For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre-verbal [[auxiliary verb|auxiliaries]], they uniformly express [[grammatical tense|tense]], [[grammatical aspect|aspect]], and [[grammatical mood|mood]]. [[Negative concord]] occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like [[Spanish language|Spanish]]). Another similarity among creole languages can be identified in the fact that questions are created simply by changing the intonation of a declarative sentence; not its word order or content.

Opposing this notion, the work by Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar at all. In a series of experiments, Hudson-Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars. They found that children tend to ignore minor variations in the input when those variations are infrequent, and reproduce only the most frequent forms. In doing so, the children tend to standardize the language they hear around them. Hudson-Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin-development situation (and in the real-life situation of a deaf child whose parents are or were [[Speech disfluency|disfluent]] [[Sign language|signers]]), children systematize the language they hear, based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not that which has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar.<ref name="Kam">{{cite journal | last1 = Hudson Kam | first1 = C. L. | last2 = Newport | first2 = E. L. | year = 2009 | title = Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages | journal = Cognitive Psychology | volume = 59 | issue = 1| pages = 30–66 | doi=10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.01.001 | pmid=19324332 | pmc=2703698}}</ref><ref name="Sciam">{{cite web |date=February 9, 2010 |author=Dye, Melody |url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/advantages-of-helpless/ |title=The Advantages of Being Helpless |work=Scientific American |access-date=June 10, 2014}}</ref> Further, they argue, it seems to follow that creole languages would share features with the languages from which they are derived, and thus look similar in terms of grammar.

Many researchers of universal grammar argue against the concept of [[relexification]], i.e. that a language replaces its lexicon almost entirely with that of another. This, they argue, goes against the universalist notions of a universal grammar, which has an innate grammar.{{citation needed|date=November 2020}}