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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES

3. INNATENESS THEORY

Who is Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky, 1928-present, American

Professor in Linguistics at MIT (more famous outside our field as a political commentator)

Chomsky

is a syntactician His work on syntax led him to believe language is innate Chomsky is a theorist, not an experimenter

But others have applied his theories

3. Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the most

influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of strong claims about language : in particular, he suggests that LANGUAGE IS AN INNATE ABILITY - that is to say that we are born with set of rules about language in our brains called the UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR or Generative Grammar.

3. INNATENESS THEORY

Nativitism Innatism Mentalists

Behaviourist position (Skinner, 1950s)

Main

behaviourist claim: all learning, including language learning, is the product of habit formation. We learn through imitation and repetition. Emphasis on the importance of the observable in any theory claiming to be scientific (empirical view). Since only behaviour is observable, we must study learning by observing behaviour patterns.

Behaviourist position
We learn through: Imitation + reinforcement (praise or success in communication) = habit formation. According to this view Stimulus-ResponseReinforcement IS the learning mechanism. Language is considered verbal behaviour. Children practise and repeat what they hear, and in this way learn their L1.

Chomsky V Skinner
Remember

Skinner? Late 1950s: environment-only theories of language acquisition in the ascendant Chomsky (1959) reviewed Skinners book Verbal Behaviour Chomsky found flaws in Skinners mechanism Chomsky argued that environment-only mechanisms couldnt possibly account for language acquisition

How so?

Evidence for Chomskyan innatism (and against environment-only mechanisms)

Evidence

People can lose their intelligence and yet they do not loose their language: substantial retarded children (e.g. Williams syndrome) manifest a good grammatical and linguistic competence. On the other hand, highly intelligent people may lack linguistic capacity (e.g. aphasia).
The fact that two kinds of abilities can dissociate quantitatively and along multiple dimensions shows that they are not manifestations of a single underlying ability. (Pinker 2003: 23)

INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS:

An innatist theory Nature over Nurture According to Chomsky, crucial parts of the human language ability are built into the brain part of our biology, programmed into our genes

Creativity

Language is CREATIVE

We can produce and understand an infinite range of novel grammatical sentences Children do not imitate a fixed repertoire of sentences

Chomsky: creativity is not explicable if language is learnt just from the environment

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

Chomskys concept of generative grammar implies a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate sentences, at the same time capable of producing infinite number of strings from the set rules. A type of grammar which describes a language by giving a set of rules that can be used to produce other possible sentences in that language.

CHOMSKYAN GENERATIVE GRAMMAR:

The Chomskyan approach towards Syntax, often termed Generative Grammar studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge that is often termed Universal Grammar is already there.

Chomskys Syntactic Theory:

The first task of Chomsky's syntax is to account for the speaker's understanding of the internal structure of sentences. Chomsky and other grammarians can represent much, though not all, of the speaker's knowledge of the internal structure of sentences with rules called "phrase structure" rules.

Chomskyan rules

How do these Chomskyan rules work? Instructions for generating sentence structures, e.g.:

S NP VP NP Det Adj N

Structural slots filled by elements from the lexicon, e.g.

Det Adj N The tall building

Chomskyan trees

Creating a Grammar
5 rules: S NP VP NP Det N NP N VP V NP VP V How many sentences? 9 words:

Det: the, four, some N: dogs, cats, slugs V: understood, ate, approached

Deep and Surface Structures

Two Levels of Representation

1.

Deep Structure (DS): represents syntactic relations (underlying representation) Surface Structure (SS): derived (surface) representation of a Deep Structure
o

2.

SS can be derived from DS by transformations like passivization, forming of questions etc.

Degeneracy of the data

The childs language data is degenerate Ungrammatical utterances are frequent and are not marked out as wrong Therefore it is impossible to deduce the grammar of a language, if your only input data is utterances from the environment

Poverty of the stimulus

A child may acquire a language even though the data itself is too poor to determine the language: the child needs no evidence for much of the knowledge He/she brings to the learning situation. Roughly, children always make the right hypotheses as a function of their genetic endowment. So environmental language data is insufficient: grammar cant be learned from it

Misleading feedback
Adults correct children for truth, not grammaticality so the feedback data children receive does not actually tell them how well they are doing Misleading feedback makes it even harder for children to learn grammar

Evidence from Creoles

Pidgin: simple language that arise in contact situations Creole: a fully complex language descended from a pidgin The grammar of a Creole is created by children as they learn it This is evidence that this grammar comes from some innate source

Universal features of language

Languages vary greatly, but have some common features Example: nouns and verbs Example: structure dependency

Grammatical rules rely on the structure of the sentence, not the surface order of the words

Structure dependency
Mr

Smith was a good man Was Mr Smith a good man?

Mr

Smith was a good man Man good a was Smith Mr?

Joe

was a good man A Joe was good man?

Syntax

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Well-formed sentence without meaning:

Ideas furiously green colorless sleep.

Syntax as well as meaning deprived of inner logic:

Syntax

Universals explained

Universals unexpected if language is learnt from the environment alone

Universals due to innate language Or due to something else?

Universal functions of language Universal forms of cognition

The theory: innate language knowledge

children dont/cant learn the rules of grammar from the language around them in their environment then these rules must have been in-born
If This

explains all the difficulties we found with environment-only acquisition theories

The Essentials

Key points of Chomskyan Theory

Innatism
What is innate? Chomsky: the essential core of grammar is innate A generative grammar that can produce an infinite range of novel sentences The innate system for language learning

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) Universal Grammar (UG) bioprogram language organ language instinct

Autonomy

Inside the Chomskyan brain

Is language autonomous?
Chomsky thinks that language is autonomous in the mind This means that language (i.e. UG) is a separate system in the brains architecture It is connected to, but does not interact extensively with, other sorts of thought

(The diagram)

Maturation

Chomskys theory is a maturationist theory Language acquisition runs to an innate biological timetable UG matures in the brain and is slowly released in predetermined stages as the child grows This linguistic maturation is analogous to the sexual maturation we go through at puberty and is just as involuntary!

Only the younger ones were at the right stage of maturation

Language is species-specific
UG and the language system only occur in the human brain Therefore, no other animals can acquire a human language But is this solely due to their lesser intelligence? Can chimps learn language?

Evolution??
How did UG get there in the first place? There is much disagreement on this

Universal Grammar
But what exactly is Universal Grammar? What knowledge does it contain? How does it function in the process of language acquisition?

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (U.G.):

Children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for language and this blueprint aids the child in the task of constructing a grammar for their language. This is known as Innateness Hypothesis.

Children Construct Grammars:

Language learning is not really something that the child does; it is something that happens to the child placed in an appropriate environment much as the childs body grows and matures in a predetermined way when provided with appropriate nutrition and environmental stimulation. --Noam Chomsky

How does UG work?

From autonomy to a black box A black box problem:

Something goes in, something comes out, but the process is hidden The hidden process is self-contained and independent Analysing the input and the output can tell us whats happening in the black box

The black box

What is in the UG black box? Chomsky says that the contents of UG explains:

a) the nature of syntax b) language acquisition

The description of the grammar and the explanation of how it is learnt are unified in this theory

The role of the input

What is the input?

Primary linguistic data This means all the language the child hears From the childs environment

The input is critical

Without input at the right stage of maturation, the childs UG cannot develop into a grammar Evidence: feral children e.g. Genie Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg)

What is the output?

Chomsky sees language competence in terms of a formal language

A lexicon Contains words, idioms, etc. Lexical items have meanings A set of abstract, algebraic rules Including the rules of syntax, phonology, etc. The rules have no meaning

The lexicon is learned normally (from experience, trial and error, imitation) but the rules are innate

Therefore

This answers our question! Q: What does UG contain? A: UG contains the core, formal rules of the grammar This is Chomskys explanation for how the generative creativity of language is acquired

Principles and parameters

The rules that produce these tree structures are innate but these rules differ from language to language! Chomsky: the UG does not contain the actual rules of each language. Instead, it contains PRINCIPLES and PARAMETERS

The rules of each language are derived from the principles and parameters

The brain: missing evidence?

Neuroscience could be convincing but our knowledge of the brain is not that advanced. We cannot see the proposed language structures Even if we could, we could not establish that these structures were innate