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INTERPRETATION OF THE WEEK 7 READINGS, Yeny Paola Correa Castro.…
INTERPRETATION OF THE WEEK 7 READINGS
Innatist / Innate / Nativist / Rationalist / Mentalist Theory
Theoretical bases:
Children are biologically programmed for language learning.
Children are born with a knack for discovering a linguistic system for themselves.
Environmental differences may be associated with some variation in the rate of language acquisition.
Evidence used to support Chomsky's innate theory:
Beyond this time the language becomes difficult to acquire.
Lenneberg suggested that there is a biologically predetermined life span during which language can be easily acquired.
The Poverty Stimulus Argument:
The environment to which the child is exposed in the environment is full of confusion.
In addition to providing all the information he needs.
Children produce words they have never heard before.
Universals of language:
Universal noun: they consist of language characteristics such as phonemes or syntactic categories such as nouns (N) and verbs (V).
Formal universal: The formal universals are the general principles that determine the form and mode of operation of the grammatical rules of a particular language.
Counterarguments to Mentalist Theory
Language acquisition is not entirely innate in nature nor is it just a matter of biological makeup.
Psychologist Jerome Bruner opined that language acquisition depends not only on LAD but also LASS or the language acquisition support system.
Children may have an innate ability to follow certain grammatical principles, but their word acquisition is fundamentally dependent on their environment.
Criticism:
LAD is an abstract concept and lacks adequate scientific support.
Relies heavily on the learner's linguistic competence, which is again an abstract phenomenon.
It placed more emphasis on the linguistic competence of adult native speakers, but not enough on the developmental aspects of language acquisition.
What Linguistic Nativism Tells us about Innateness
The difficulties raised by the notion of
innateness:
Interactionism refers to the idea that the interaction of genes and environment is constant and omnipresent in the development of each trait in a living way.
The definition of innate cannot be absolute; it must be relative, that is, it must take into account the fundamental facts of interactionism.
It can be said that a phenotypic trait is innate, but this does not exclude the role of the environment in the development of that trait.
A defense of the notion of innateness based on the analysis of the linguistic nativism debate:
Absolute means that the environment does not play any role in the development of an innate phenotypic trait.
General means that the de nition applies to any phenotypic trait, whatever it is.
Chomsky claims that the language faculty is innate.
Chomsky's nativist claim is based on a crucial distinction that Chomsky introduces to characterize the language faculty.
The ability to learn any language (universal grammar).
The linguistic competence of individual speakers in their own language.
The ability to learn a language is what Chomsky calls Universal Grammar.
The purpose of the universal grammar hypothesis is to provide an explanation of language acquisition.
Implications for the understanding of both Chomsky’s nativist claim and the notion of innateness:
Chomsky proposes a linguistic characterization of the initial state of the language faculty, which is the Universal Grammar.
The biological entrenchment of the Universal Grammar does not rely on an identi cation of the linguistic principles and their neurobiological basis in the brain.
Neither at the genetic level nor at the neuronal level does Universal Grammar identify with the structures or the mechanisms which underlie it.
Yeny Paola Correa Castro. 1002523374. Language Adquisition Theories.