![]() Not being himself a neurobiologist, he talks of those theoretical structures, responsible for reproducing accurate syntax, as a metaphorical “language acquisition device” (LAD), a hardwired faculty that separates the human brain from that of a dog or cat.Ĭhomsky’s theory has little to do with the content of language, but rather with its structure, which he says is universally encoded in our neural architecture. ![]() Chomsky’s theory is biolinguistic: it situates language acquisition in the structures of the brain. (“Give me a child,” said Skinner, “and I will shape him into anything.”)Ĭhomsky “gave a twist” to this age-old debate over the existence of innate ideas, as Gillian Anderson tells us in the animated video above from BBC 4’s History of Ideas series. Skinner suggests that operant conditioning writes language onto a totally impressionable mind. Descartes picks up Plato’s dualism, arguing that humans speak and animals don’t because of the existence of an immortal “rational soul.” Behaviourist B.F. Variations on these positions surface in different forms throughout Western intellectual history. They were folded into general theories of epistemology, like Plato’s theory of forms or John Locke’s so-called “blank slate” hypothesis. Questions about language acquisition have always been the subject of intense philosophical speculation. His answers produced a theory of Universal Grammar in the 1960s, and for decades, it has been the reigning theory in the field to beat, initiating what is often referred to as the “Chomskyan Era,” a phrase the man himself dislikes but which nonetheless sums up the kinds of issues that have been at stake in linguistics for over fifty years. These are the questions that confronted Noam Chomsky in the early years of his career in linguistics. Children might make routine mistakes, but they understand and can be understood from a very early age, and for the most part without very much difficulty. ![]() And yet, they learn the function and order of subjects, verbs, and objects, and learn to recognize improper usage. There is compelling evidence for both theories, but more work must be done to fully under-stand the development of this incredible human ability.They are not formally taught to use speech they have limited cognitive abilities and a “poverty of stimulus,” given their highly circumscribed environments. Children interpret statistical information to form grammatically correct sentences, adjusting their speech patterns using corrections from their parents. Top cognitive psychologists, including Michael Tomasello and John Macnamara, posit that language ability in children mirrors other learned behaviors. Since children are able to compose unique, grammatically correct sentences, their faculty goes beyond what could be achieved by replicating learned behavior. ![]() Lan-guage is a highly complex faculty, and since even small children can grasp its principles, Chomsky argues that they must be born with the ability to process and produce language. Noam Chomsky was a pioneer of the Language Acquisition Device theory, in which he states that humans have an innate ability to learn language. The origin of language in humans has been a subject of considerable debate in psychology.
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