Nature, Nurture And Universal Grammar

Following Noam Chomsky’s 1959 critical analysis of the Empiricist BF Skinner, in his now famous book about language acquisition ‘Verbal Behaviour’, Chomsky developed the generative theory of language acquisition (LA). From which Chomsky eventually proposes the concept of ‘Universal Grammar’ (UG). Since then a number of other key approaches have been theorized, which argue both for and against the validity and defining terminology of Chomsky’s seminal ‘Nativist’ work. The late 1960’s and early 1970’s saw a resurgence in the Functionalist (a school of the ‘cognitive behavioural analysis’) approach to LA, and Chomsky himself has also been instrumental in refining and redefining his conceptions to address criticisms and enhance his original theory to encompass the vast array of divergent linguistic study that has followed his original theory of UG. These two renowned approaches to understanding LA were not operating in isolation, other researchers were at the same time, providing important and ground-breaking ideas enhancing the understanding of LA, the Generative and Functional approaches remain the most influential and overarching schools of thought into how LA occurs. This paper investigates theories related to the early stages of LA, the ongoing influence of Skinner’s ‘Empiricist’ and Chomsky’s ‘Nativist’ theories and touches on how the fundamental ideas in these conceptual frameworks have been refined by later linguistics research. Have the considerably diversifying modern approaches to tackling the science of LA, managed to reinforce or refute Chomsky’s and Skinner’s theories? The conclusion to this paper will consider whether these concepts are indeed mutually exclusive?

European Journal of Language and Literature, 2017

This paper aims to discuss the two main approaches to language acquisition and present the main ideas behind the nativist and the usage-based account. The concomitant argument between the two sides has been present in linguistics ever since the proposal of innateness was provided by the paradigm of mainstream generative grammar (Chomsky 1965). In order to contribute to the ongoing discussion, we will attempt to outline the main challenges that the both theoretical strands are faced with and provide an overview of syntactic evidence provided by linguists whose work was devoted to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition. Our goal is to analyze the insights provided by the phenomena such as syntactic bootstrapping, poverty of the stimulus, multiple argument realizations and non-canonical syntactic constructions and argue that integrating these findings into a usage-based framework (Tomasello 2000, 2003 - 2009) or various instances of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995 - 1...

Language Sciences, 2005

Chomsky (1965, 1986) presents a series of arguments for an innate syntactic component of the language faculty. Do the arguments proposed at that time still stand, or have they been overridden by newer proposals? The current paper emphasizes three research directions among the most recent advances in cognitive science. These directions lead to alternate proposals to the generative linguistic theory of language development. First, the 'item-based' theory of language development, which stresses that development of language knowledge goes from specific to general and is compatible with developing research in cognitive linguistics. Second, the apparent uniformity of adult linguistic competence, which is a fundamental tenet of generative linguistics theory, may be the product of literate cultures but not of invariants of the brain, as attested by the fundamental differences found between spoken and written language. Third, artificial neural networks provide evidence against the necessity to call on algebraic rules to explain language performance and this, in turn, argues in favor of the emergence approach and of the dynamic systems approach to language development. All this calls for a renewal of language development theories and for a separation between statistical, non-algebraic, non-conscious, item-based, and usage-based structures and processes dedicated to spoken language (and to automatized written language processes), and principle-and-rule-governed, algebraic structures and processes dedicated to conscious written or formal spoken language.

2015

The phenomenon of language acquisition is a controversial issue within the field of language-related studies. Different approaches have been proposed to take account of this complicated matter. The present paper attempts at reviewing the current cognitive perspectives on language acquisition, i.e., Connectionism and Emergentism and exploring to what extent they are different from Nativism.

Unpublished manuscript found on the Internet address …, 1997

The study of child language acquisition is dominated by three major competing visions: socialization theory, learning theory, and nativist theory. Each takes a different approach to a core issue in developmental psycholinguistics known as the logical problem of language acquisition (LPLA). This paper argues that the LPLA is composed of two, only partially related, sub-problems. The first form of the LPLA emphasizes recovery from overgeneralization. Nativists claim that, contrary to the claims of socialization theory, recovery occurs without corrective feedback under the guidance of innate constraints.

The mechanisms involved in enabling us to interpret phonology, semantics, pragmatics and acquire grammar from speech is still debated in Psychology. Language development is a process and after decades of research the understanding of this process has resulted in a collection of theories. This essay will focus on the Nativist Theory, which posits that language learning is an innate process as well as exploring challenges from the Interactional perspective, which argues it is an interaction between innate ability/environment and Connectionism that argues language development emerges from interconnected networks of neural processes. A comprehensive analysis of their principles concerning language development will be communicated including evaluation of their viewpoints. Research is examined to evidence the application of these theories and also what is essential for future research to consider in the area of language development.

The Linguistic Review, 2002

Nativists inspired by Chomsky are apt to provide arguments with the following general form: languages exhibit interesting generalizations that are not suggested by casual (or even intensive) examination of what people actually say; correspondingly, adults (i.e., just about anyone above the age of four) know much more about language than they could plausibly have learned on the basis of their experience; so absent an alternative account of the relevant generalizations and speakers' (tacit) knowledge of them, one should conclude that there are substantive "universal" principles of human grammar and, as a result of human biology, children can only acquire languages that conform to these principles. According to Pullum and Scholz, linguists need not suppose that children are innately endowed with "speciÞc contingent facts about natural languages." But Pullum and Scholz don't consider the kinds of facts that really impress nativists. Nor do they offer any plausible acquisition scenarios that would culminate in the acquisition of languages that exhibit the kinds of rich and interrelated generalizations that are exhibited by natural languages. As we stress, good poverty-of-stimulus arguments are based on speciÞc principles-conÞrmed by drawing on (negative and crosslinguistic) data unavailable to children-that help explain a range of independently established linguistic phenomena. If subsequent psycholinguistic experiments show that very young children already know such principles, that strengthens the case for nativism; and if further investigation shows that children sometimes "try out" constructions that are unattested in the local language, but only if such constructions are attested in other human languages, then the case for nativism is made stronger still. We illustrate these points by considering an apparently disparate-but upon closer inspection, interestingly related-cluster of phenomena involving: negative polarity items, the interpretation of 'or', binding theory, and displays of Romance and Germanic constructions in Child-English.

The question whether and to what extent language should be regarded as an innate endowment of the human brain or the result of (ontogenetically) environmental stimulus and (phylogenetically) historical development is still open. The paper proposes some evidence, strictly linguistic in nature, against the widespread idea that the acquisition of language features from the stimulus available to the child should be impossible without an innate Universal Grammar working as a Language Acquisition Device already present in the brain at birth. It also evaluates in a methodological perspective the two main paths of explanation for the presence of linguistic features in our competence, namely their being encoded in a brain module and their being acquired from experience, concluding that -on epistemological grounds -the latter has to be preferred.

1981

The study of child language acquisition is dominated by three major competing visions: socialization theory, learning theory, and nativist theory. Each takes a different approach to a core issue in developmental psycholinguistics known as the logical problem of language acquisition (LPLA). This paper argues that the LPLA is composed of two, only partially related, sub-problems. The first form of the LPLA emphasizes recovery from overgeneralization. Nativists claim that, contrary to the claims of socialization theory, recovery occurs without corrective feedback under the guidance of innate constraints.

Synthese, 1973

Noam Chomsky's work in linguistic theory has had a revolutionary impact on the study of language. Probably the most controversial of Chomsky's claims (and certainly the one which has received the most attention from scholars in disciplines other than linguistics) is that human beings are genetically endowed with a highly structured language learning mechanism, knowledge of which will also provide knowledge about the scope and limits of the human mind. This claim is referred to as the 'Innateness Hypothesis', and Chomsky bases it on the apparent incompatibility of two well-established facts: (i) that natural languages are immensely complex structurally-so much so that nobody has ever succeeded in writing a complete grammar of any one of them (i.e., a set of rules which will specify precisely which strings of words are wellformed sentences); and (ii) that all normal children master their native tongues in a remarkably short period (generally aggreed to be no more than four years) with little or no formal instruction. Chomsky has suggested in various places that reconciling these facts is "the fundamental empirical problem of linguistics" (Chomsky, 1971). The Innateness Hypothesis makes it possible to solve this problem by positing that many of the complex features of natural languages are not learned by the child, but rather reflect the structure of the innate language learning apparatus. That is to say, any structural properties of languages which are manifestations of the structure of the innate language learning mechanisms are not themselves learned. Hence, what the child actually learns in acquiring a language may in fact be far less than it at first seems. It follows from this account of (i) and (ii) that there must be numerous structural properties common to all natural languages. Since any normal child will acquire the language to which he or she is exposed, we can assume that all humans have identical innate language learning mech