SLA Lecture 3

7/28/2019 SLA Lecture 3

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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

THEORIES


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3. INNATENESS THEORY


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Who is Chomsky?

Noam Chomsky, 1928-present, American

Professor in Linguistics at MIT (more famous outside our field as a political

commentator)

Chomsky is a syntactician

His work on syntax led him to believelanguage is innate

Chomsky is a theorist, not an experimenter But others have applied his theories


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3. Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomskyis perhaps the best known and the most

influential linguist of the second half of the TwentiethCentury. He has made a number of strong claims about

language : in particular, he suggests that LANGUAGE IS

AN INNATE ABILITY - that is to say that we are born

with set of rules about language in our brains called theUNIVERSAL GRAMMAR or Generative Grammar.


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3. INNATENESS THEORY

Nativitism

Innatism

Mentalists


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Behaviourist position (Skinner, 1950s)

Main behaviourist claim: all learning,

including language learning, is the product ofhabit formation.

We learn through imitation and repetition.

Emphasis on the importance of the

observable in any theory claiming to bescientific (empirical view).

Since only behaviour is observable, we must

study learning by observing behaviouratterns.


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Behaviourist position

We learn through:

Imitation + reinforcement (praise or success incommunication) = habit formation.

According to this view Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement IS the learning mechanism.

Language is consideredverbal behaviour

.

Children practise and repeat what they hear, and inthis way learn their L1.


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Chomsky V Skinner

Remember Skinner?

Late 1950s: environment-only theories oflanguage acquisition in the ascendant

Chomsky (1959) reviewed Skinners book

Verbal Behaviour

Chomsky found flaws in Skinners mechanism

Chomsky argued that environment-only

mechanisms couldnt possibly account for

language acquisition


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Evidence for Chomskyan innatism

(and against environment-only

mechanisms)

How so?


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Evidence

People can lose their intelligence and yet they donot loose their language: substantial retarded

children (e.g. Williams syndrome) manifest a goodgrammatical and linguistic competence.

On the other hand, highly intelligent people may

lack linguistic capacity (e.g. aphasia).

The fact that two kinds of abilities can dissociatequantitatively and along multiple dimensions shows that theyare not manifestations of a single underlying ability. (Pinker

2003: 23)


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INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS:

An innatist theory

Nature over Nurture

According to Chomsky, crucial parts of the

human language ability are built into thebrainpart of our biology, programmed

into our genes


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Creativity

Language is CREATIVE

We can produce and understand an infinite rangeof novel grammatical sentences

Children do not imitate a fixed repertoire of

sentences

Chomsky: creativity is not explicable if languageis learnt just from the environment


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CHOMSKYAN GENERATIVE

GRAMMAR:

The Chomskyan approach towards Syntax, oftentermed Generative Grammar studies grammar as a

body of knowledge possessed by language users.Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained thatmuch of this knowledge is innate, implying thatchildren need only learn certain parochial features oftheir native languages. The innate body of linguistic

knowledge that is often termed Universal Grammaris already there.


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Chomskys Syntactic Theory:

The first task of Chomsky's syntax is to

account for the speaker's understanding ofthe internal structure of sentences. Chomsky

and other grammarians can represent much,

though not all, of the speaker's knowledge of

the internal structure of sentences with rulescalled "phrase structure" rules.


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Chomskyan rules

How do these Chomskyan rules work?

Instructions for generating sentencestructures, e.g.: S NP VP

NP Det Adj N

Structural slots filled by elements from thelexicon, e.g. Det Adj NThe tall building


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Chomskyan trees


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Deep and Surface Structures


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Two Levels of Representation

1. Deep Structure (DS):

represents syntactic relations (underlyingrepresentation)

2. Surface Structure (SS):

derived (surface) representation of a DeepStructure

o SS can be derived from DS by transformations like

passivization, forming of questions etc.


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Degeneracy of the data

The childs language data is degenerate

Ungrammatical utterances are frequent and arenot marked out as wrong

Therefore it is impossible to deduce the grammar

of a language, if your only input data is

utterances from the environment


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Poverty of the stimulus

A child may acquire a language even thoughthe data itself is too poor to determine the

language: the child needs no evidence formuch of the knowledge He/she brings to thelearning situation.

Roughly, children always make the righthypotheses as a function of their geneticendowment.

So environmental language data is

insufficient: grammar cant be learned from it


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Misleading feedback

Adults correct children for truth, not

grammaticality

so the feedback data children receive does

not actually tell them how well they are doing

Misleading feedback makes it even harder for

children to learn grammar


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Evidence from Creoles

Pidgin: simple language that arise in contactsituations

Creole: a fully complex language descendedfrom a pidgin

The grammar of a Creole is created by childrenas they learn it

This is evidence that this grammar comes fromsome innate source


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Universal features of language

Languages vary greatly, but have some common

features

Example: nouns and verbs

Example: structure dependency

Grammatical rules rely on the structure of the

sentence, not the surface order of the words


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Structure dependency

Mr Smith was a good man

Was Mr Smith a good man?

Mr Smith was a good man

Man good a was Smith Mr?

Joe was a good man

A Joe was good man?


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Syntax

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Well-formed sentence without meaning:

Ideas furiously green colorless sleep.

Syntax as well as meaning deprived of inner logic:


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Syntax


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Universals explained

Universals unexpected if language is learnt from

the environment alone

Universals due to innate language

Or due to something else?

Universal functions of language Universal forms of cognition


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The theory:

innate language knowledge

If children dont/cant learn the rules of

grammar from the language around them in

their environment

then these rules must have been in-born

This explains all the difficulties we found with

environment-only acquisition theories


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Key points of Chomskyan Theory

The Essentials


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Innatism

What is inn ate?

Chomsky: the essential core of grammar isinnate

A generative grammar that can produce aninfinite range of novel sentences

The innate system for language learning

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Universal Grammar (UG)

bioprogram

language organ

language instinct


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Inside the Chomskyan brain

Autonomy


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Is language autonomous?

Chomsky thinks that language is autonomous in

the mind

This means that language (i.e. UG) is a separate

system in the brains architecture

It is connected to, but does not interact

extensively with, other sorts of thought


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(The diagram)


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Maturation

Chomskys theory is a maturationisttheory

Language acquisition runs to an innate biological

timetable UG matures in the brain and is slowly released in

predetermined stages as the child grows

This linguisticmaturation is analogous to the sexual

maturation we go through at puberty

and is just as involuntary!

Only the younger ones were at the right stage of maturation


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Language is species-specific

UG and the language system only occur in thehuman brain

Therefore, no other animals can acquire ahuman language

But is this solely due to their lesser intelligence?

Can chimps learn language?


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Evolution??

How did UG get there in the first place?

There is much disagreement on this


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Universal Grammar

But what exactly is Universal Grammar?

What knowledge does it contain?

How does it function in the process of languageacquisition?


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UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (U.G.):

Children are equipped with an innate

template or blueprint for language and this

blueprint aids the child in the task of

constructing a grammar for their language.

This is known as Innateness Hypothesis.


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Children Construct Grammars:

Language learning is not really something that

the child does; it is something that happens to thechild placed in an appropriate environment much

as the childs body grows and matures in a

predetermined way when provided with

appropriate nutrition and environmental

stimulation.

--Noam Chomsky


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How does UG work?

From autonomy to a black box

A black box problem:

Something goes in, something comes out, but the

process is hidden

The hidden process is self-contained and independent Analysing the input and the output can tell us whats

happening in the black box


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The black box

What is in the UG black box?

Chomsky says that the contents of UG explains: a) the nature of syntax b) language acquisition

The description of the grammar and the explanation ofhow it is learnt are unified in this theory


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The role of the input

What is the input? Primary linguistic data

This means all the language the child hears From the childs environment

The input is critical

Without input at the right stage of maturation, thechilds UG cannot develop into a grammar

Evidence: feral children e.g. Genie

Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg)


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What is the output?

Chomsky sees language competence in terms of aformallanguage

A lexicon Contains words, idioms, etc.

Lexical items have meanings

A set of abstract, algebraic rules

Including the rules of syntax, phonology, etc.

The rules have no meaning

The lexicon is learned normally (from experience,trial and error, imitation)

but the rules are innate


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Therefore

This answers our question!

Q: What does UG contain?

A: UG contains the core, formal rules of the

grammar

This is Chomskys explanation for how the

generative creativity of language is acquired


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Principles and parameters

The rules that produce these tree structuresare innate

but these rules differ from language tolanguage!

Chomsky: the UG does not contain the actualrules of each language.

Instead, it contains PRINCIPLES andPARAMETERS The rules of each language are derived from the

principles and parameters


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The brain: missing evidence?

Neuroscience could be convincing

but our knowledge of the brain is not that

advanced.

We cannot see the proposed language structures

Even if we could, we could not establish that

these structures were innate

SLA Lecture 3

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