The Chomsky School of Language

THE CHOMSKY SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 101 PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY REQUIRED READING Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use Rules and Representations Review of Verbal Behavior* Language and Learning: Reflections on Language The Debate between On the Biological Basis of Language Capacities Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky Logical Syntax and Semantics * Written by B.F. Skinner LESSON #1 UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG) PROFESSOR CHOMSKY SAYS: ...................... ............................. UG (Universal Grammar] may be regarded as • All languages have the same basic structure, called "Universal Grammar," that underlies the specific patterns found in individual languages. a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device • Principles and parameters theory: A child's language faculty incorporates: 1. A set of universal principles of grammatical structure 2. A set of parameters that vary from language to language that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language. Since all humans share the same brain structures that harbor • The universal principles are innate. The only thing a child has to learn about grammatical structure is how to set the parameters for his particular language. language, there exist deep similarities in all languages. HIS STUDENTS SAY OLD If that's true, where did Universal Grammar THE come from? Why do we all have it? MEN That seems a little far-reaching. What about languages we don't even know exist? Would they follow the same rules that known languages do according to UG? LESSON #2 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD) PROFESSOR CHOMSKY SAYS: We are refined by natural selection. • We're born with a hard-wired “language acquisition device" (LAD) in our brains. Human language appears to ................... --------* be a unique phenomenon, • This gives us the innate ability to acquire language quickly and at identical stages across cultures. .... .... . without significant analogue in the animal world. DARWIN .............. • Krashen even incorporated this concept into his theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). HIS STUDENTS SAY ...............................................-------....................... FILTER But what about B.F. Skinner, for example, who argues that interactions with the ACQUIRED COMPETENCE INPUT LAD environment matter more? Doesn't reinforcement play a bigger role in language acquisition? LESSON #3 BEHAVIORISM PROFESSOR CHOMSKY SAYS: ........ . Whatever 'behaviorism' may have served in the past, • Skinner assumes that children are born as blank slates (tabula rasae) and that they learn language through external factors like reinforcement. it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on 'legitimate' theory construction. There is neither empirical evidence • In 1958, psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason developed the Wug Test, which showed that children creatively apply morphological rules to made-up words, such as "wug" (/w^g/). 97% of first graders gave the correct plural of this word: /wAgz/ nor any known argument to support any specific claim about the relative importance of 'feedback' from the environment and the 'independent contribution of the organism' in the process of language acquisition. HIS STUDENTS SAY We need more evidence for UG and this language acquisition device! THIS IS A WUG. NOW THERE IS ANOTHER ONE. THERE ARE TWO OF THEM. What about applying morphological rules THERE ARE Two to irregular verbs? For example, lots of children will overgeneralize rules and say things like 'teached' and 'bringed: LESSON #4 POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS PROFESSOR CHOMSKY SAYS: ----------....... ......... The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we • Children have an extraordinary ability to use language despite having minimal exposure to allowable syntactic variants. They know linguistic facts without instruction or direct evidence. may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar: Even before the age of 5, children • The Poverty of the Stimulus (PoS) argument concludes that humans must have some sort of innate linguistic knowledge that allows them to make these generalizations. can produce and interpret sentences they've never heard before. ............... NEXT CLASS Language acquisition discussion to be continued. NP VP ASSIGNMENT AdjP AdvP Try to meaningfully interpret this sentence Adj AdjP Adv Adj Adj Sleep Adv Colorless Adj Ideas Furiously Green ReadySetDebate Sources: Rochester Institute of Technology | Duke University | Stanford University Northern Illinois University | BrainyQuote.com | thebrain.mcgill.ca VOXY learn a language from life voxy.com/blog COMES MAN COME -> -