[MENTALISM – NOAM CHOMSKY]

 Mentalism or Innate Theory: Mentalism theory of language

acquisition was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. This theory came
up as a reaction against Behaviorism. He postulates that humans
have an inborn or innate faculty for language acquisition that is
biologically determined.
 Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Noam Chomsky, a pioneering
linguist put forward an idea called the Language Acquisition
Device (LAD). The Language Acquisition Device is a hypothetical
tool in the brain that helps children understand the fundamental
rules of human language. The Language Acquisition Device
functions as a decoding and encoding system that provides
children with a baseline understanding of the important
characteristics of language. Moreover, Children make virtuous
errors of grammar and language which adults do not generally
make. These mistakes can give us information as to how children
learn a language. For example, children have an unconscious
ability to recognise the past tense and will begin to associate
words ending with a /ed/ or /t/ sound with the past tense such as,
‘I goed’ rather than ‘I went’. Nobody taught them to say ‘I goed’;
they figured that out for themselves.
 Language as a Universal Property: According to Chomsky, infants
acquire grammar because it is a universal property of language, an
inborn development, and has coined these fundamental
grammatical ideas that all humans have in the form of universal
grammar (UG). Children under the age of three typically don’t talk
in complete sentences; instead, they use small phrases like ‘Want
cookie’, but yet you would still not hear them say things like ‘want
my’ or ‘I cookie’ because statements like this would break the
syntactic structure of the phrase which is a part of universal
grammar.
 Critical Period Hypothesis: Another argument of the nativist or
innate theory is that there is a critical period for language
acquisition, which is a time frame during which environmental
exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. A Linguist Eric
Lenneberg postulated that the critical period of language
acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He believed that if no
language was learned before then, it could never be learned in a
normal and functional sense. It was termed the critical period
hypothesis and since then there has been a few case examples of
individuals being subject to such circumstances such as the girl
known as Genie who raised in an abusive environment to age 13,
which didn’t allow her to develop language skills.