“Language sets us apart”, other animals communicate but they have nothing on the intricate grammar of human languages, how is it we are able to learn to speak in language so easily? Young children become adept in a new language very quickly, since the dawn of philosophy thinkers have argued whether or not we have innate ideas. Plato for example believed we were born already possessing some instinctive knowledge, whereas empiricists such as John Locke argued the mind begins like a blank slate, which over time absorbs different skills and information.
Chomsky’s Hypothesis
In 1960 Noam Chomsky demonstrated that children learning to speak just don’t have enough information to form complex grammatical manoeuvres that allow them to generate new and unlimited sentences, however they do so with ease, therefore something else must be happening. Chomsky’s theory was that there are inborn structures in our brain, what he called a “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD), which provides us a natural disposition to organise the languages which we hear in various grammatical methods, without which, we would be unable to get started as language learners. If Chomsky’s proposal is correct, language structure is hardwired as a form of universal grammar, our “slates” have already been written on before we are even born. The hypothesis asserts that the brain is like every other system in the biological world, in that it is highly differentiated into sub-systems and structure and one of these has a special design for acquiring language.
Therefore the ability to use spoken language is in our genetic makeup, coded in the DNA, just like it’s in our DNA to have two arms, it’s in our DNA to be innately able to speak. For example we are designed to walk, the idea that we have to be in an environment of walking people to be able to walk is false whereas the idea we are designed to walk is certain, the same applies to the acquisition of language. Chomsky explains, “Nobody’s taught language, you can’t prevent a child from learning it, it has very much the properties of normal physical growth”. Furthermore Chomsky highlights that a child could not acquire a language through imitation only, as the language they are exposed to is often highly irregular and often ungrammatical. Some arguments that support Chomsky’s LAD hypothesis are as follows…
- Children learning to speak don’t make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.
- Children often make grammatical mistakes such as “I sawed” instead of “I saw”, which could not have been learnt passively.
- If an adult intentionally said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the child would recognize it.
Siôn Davies
Introduction to Linguistics 