Skinner’s ‘behaviourist’ language acquisition theory. 69) and credits the social interaction that we have when we are children as being the main factor in language acquisition.Ĭhomsky is well known outside of his language studies, but he first came to prominence in 1959 when he wrote a damning review of B.F. These focus on “meaning in use” (Tomasello, 2009, p. On other side of the argument, or the nurture side, ‘functionalist’ or ‘social constructivist’ are the terms used to describe Tomasello’s theory. Chomsky spearheaded the ‘mentalist’ theory of language acquisition, which hypothesizes that language is innate to us as human beings it is as natural to us as breathing. Is language part of our genetic make-up, or do we learn it through our observations as children of the speakers around us? Respectively, they each represent the different sides of the nature vs nurture debate. They aim to answer the age-old question in regards to language acquisition: ‘nature or nurture?’. Oxford, 1997.Would you ever think there would be so much controversy on how a child says their first word? Have you ever wondered where the ability to acquire language comes from? Even if you haven’t, Noam Chomsky and Michael Tomasello have done all the wondering for you. “Evolution of Universal Grammar.” Science, vol. “Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and Second Language Learning.” Applied Linguistics 6.1 (1985): 2-18. Both examples therefore exploit the same argument, known as ‘the poverty of the stimulus’, to show that the child knows things about language he could not have learnt from outside, that important aspects of language are not strictly speaking learnable” (“Chomsky’s Universal Grammar”).Ĭook, Vivian J. If the child has not learnt the distinction from the input, he must have done so from some property of his own mind. “A second example from English is the well-known pair, ‘John is eager to please’ and ‘John is easy to please’, taken from the earlier ‘Aspects’ model (Chomsky 1965)….Conceivably an adult might explain the difference to the child, or some feature of the particular situation might make it obvious such accidental and improbable occurrences cannot explain why children go through the same stages in acquiring ‘eager/easy to please’ and are successful at about the same age (Cromer 1970). Poverty of stimulus is the ability of the human brain to recognize correct and incorrect grammar even in novel sentences. The proposed solution is universal grammar” (114). Linguists call this phenomenon the “poverty of stimulus” (5) or the “paradox of language acquisition” (6). This information is insufficient for uniquely determining the underlying grammatical principles (4). Children have to deduce the rules of their native language from sample sentences they receive from their parents and others. Exactly how the mental grammar comes into a child’s mind is a puzzle. Children of the same speech community reliably learn the same grammar. “Children acquire their mental grammar spontaneously and without formal training. Without this LAD, according to Chomsky, children would never be able to learn language from the input they receive. Chomsky theorized that the brain contains a mechanism he referred to as a language acquisition device (LAD), which is “separate from other faculties of cognitive activity….Input is needed, but only to ‘trigger’ the operation of the language acquisition device” (Ellis 32). Universal Grammar (UG) is a theoretical concept proposed by Noam Chomsky (not without criticism or controversy from scholars in the scientific community) that the human brain contains an innate mental grammar that helps humans acquire language.
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