** PERSEPSCTIVES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT **

NATIVISM

 Language is something that happen to the child when placed in an appropriate environment
rather than something the child does
 Language acquisition must rely on innate abilities
 Children are born with a special ability to discover the underlying rules of a language system
 The environment is only a trigger to the maturation of the faculty of language; it does not
shape or train verbal behaviors
 Focuses on language competence  there is a language faculty in the brain

Pinker
 Language is an instinct, it is not learnt but determined by a biological basis
 Language development is more like the development of an organ
 Training is not needed for language acquisition
 Language development follows its own schedule (babbling  one-word  multiword 
sentences: onset of language development is similar across children in different cultures)

Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

 An imaginary device inside the brain that contain all and only the grammatical rules and
linguistic knowledge which are universal to all human languages  Universal Grammar
(UG)
 For the LAD to work, the child needs access only to samples of a natural language. These
language samples serve as a trigger to activate the device.
 Once it is activated, the child is able to discover the structure of the language to be learned by
matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical relationships in LAD to the structures
of the particular language in the environment.

Evidence supporting and against nativism

  children develop language rapidly, effortlessly and without direct instruction or imitation
  overregularization (past tense & plural morpheme) suggests that children are rule learners
 Studies from fMRI show that infants’ brain responded asymmetrically to speech versus non-
speech (left speech stimuli; right non-speech stimuli)
  Deaf children without immediate language input were found to produce gestures to
communicate with others  born with inner knowledge and born to use language
  Adults did provide grammaticality feedback  children receiving a corrective recast are
more likely to produce grammatical sentence
  passive exposure to language does not produce normal language skills  environment and
social interaction are more than a trigger