Page "Universal grammar" Paragraph 26

However, extensive work by Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar, as has sometimes been supposed.

In a series of experiments, Hudson-Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars.

Notably, 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, they tend to standardize the language that they hear around them.

Hudson-Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin situation ( and in the real life situation of a deaf child whose parents were disfluent signers ), children are systematizing the language they hear based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not, as has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar.

Further, it seems unsurprising that creoles would share features with the languages they are derived from and thus look similar " grammatically.