The linguist Noam Chomsky developed the innatist theory in reaction to the behaviourist theory of learning based on imitation and habit formation. He claims that children are biologically programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just the same way that other biological functions do. For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar to the development of walking. The environment makes a basic contribution (such as people speaking to the child) and the child’s biological endowment will do the rest.
Chomsky argues that the behaviourist theory fails to recognize what has come to be called the logical problem of language acquisition (the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. According to Chomsky, the language the child is exposed does not provide all the information which the child needs and parental corrections have been observed to be inconsistent or even non-existent and when they do they tend to focus on meaning and not on language itself.
According to Chomsky, children’s minds are not blank stales to be filled merely by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead he claims that children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system. He originally referred to this special ability as being based on a language acquisition device (LAD) which was often described as an imaginary “black box” that contains the principles that are universal to all human languages, prevents the child from going off on lots of wrong trails in trying to discover the rules of the language. For the LAD (now referred as Universal Grammar - UG) to work, the child needs access only to samples of the natural language that serve as a trigger to activate the device.
In acquiring the intricate and complex systems that make up a language, young children, whose abilities are fairly limited in many ways, accomplish, with apparent ease, something which adult second language learners may envy.
Chomsky argues that the behaviourist theory fails to recognize what has come to be called the logical problem of language acquisition (the fact that children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear. According to Chomsky, the language the child is exposed does not provide all the information which the child needs and parental corrections have been observed to be inconsistent or even non-existent and when they do they tend to focus on meaning and not on language itself.
According to Chomsky, children’s minds are not blank stales to be filled merely by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead he claims that children are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system. He originally referred to this special ability as being based on a language acquisition device (LAD) which was often described as an imaginary “black box” that contains the principles that are universal to all human languages, prevents the child from going off on lots of wrong trails in trying to discover the rules of the language. For the LAD (now referred as Universal Grammar - UG) to work, the child needs access only to samples of the natural language that serve as a trigger to activate the device.
In acquiring the intricate and complex systems that make up a language, young children, whose abilities are fairly limited in many ways, accomplish, with apparent ease, something which adult second language learners may envy.
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