GENERAL IDEAS OFLANGUAGE ACQUISITION

By:ABDUL MOMIN

&MUHAMMAD AMIR

Language Before Noam Chomsky

Before Chomsky, Language wasconsidered as behavior not knowledge, asincorporated in the structuralists linguistsbest known from Bloomfield‟s bookLanguage.(Bloomfield 1933)

The adult is a crucial part of LanguageAcquisition Process; the child would neverlearn to use any word without the adult‟sreaction and reinforcement.

The Bloomfieldian version of languageacquisition was the commonplace of lingusiticsbefore Chomsky. (Cont.)

Chomsky repudiated behaviorist theory ofB.F.Skinner.

According to Skinner, Language isdetermined by stimuli consisting of specificattributes of the situation, by responsesthe stimuli call up in the organism, and byreinforcing stimuli that are theirconsequences. (e.g., Milk-Deprivation)

As with Bloomfield , Language originatesfrom a physical need and is a means to aphysical end. The parents‟ provision ofreinforcement is a vital part of the process.

CHOMSKY’s Views of Language Creativity is the key notion for Chomsky. People regularly understand and produce

sentences that they have never heard before. Stimulus is not always as simple as milk

deprivation. What would be the response of aperson looking at a painting. He might sayDutch or Clashes with the wallpaper, I think youlike abstract art, Never saw it before, Tilted,Hanging too low, Dull, Beautiful, Awesome,Stunning, or any thing else comes to mind.

One stimulus apparently has many responses. There can be no certain prediction from

stimulus to response. (Cont.)

In other words, human language is basicallyunpredictable from the stimulus.

The important thing about language is that itis stimulus-free not stimulus-bound. We cansay anything anywhere without beingcontrolled by precise stimuli.

The children rarely encounters appropriateexternal rewards or punishment; „it is nottrue that children can learn language onlythrough “meticulous care” on the part ofadults who shape their verbal repertoirethrough careful differential reinforcement‟(Chomsky, 1959, p42)

We cannot simply predict a particularresponse from any particular stimulus.

STATES OF LANGUAGE FACULTY Chomsky has conceptualized language in terms of

initial and final „states‟ of the mind‟. In thebeginning is the mind of new-born baby whoknows no language, termed the initial or zerostate, S0.

At the end is the adult native speaker with fullknowledge of language. This final state is staticand competence is essentially complete andunchanging once it has been attained. The adultnative speaker‟s knowledge is therefore termed asthe steady state or Ss.

Acquiring language means progressing from nothaving any language, S0 to having fullcompetence, Ss.

S0 Ss

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Children hear a number of sentences saidby their parents and other caretaker- the„primary linguistic data’; they processthese in some fashion within their blackbox called the Language AcquisitionDevice (LAD), and they acquire linguisticcompetence i.e. a „generative grammer‟

Input Output

„primary linguistic data‟ „generative grammar‟

It shows that LAD not only processesinput data but also add something of itsown in this raw data.

LanguageAcquisition

Device

3 Levels of Adequacy

The poverty of the stimulus argumentPlato’s Problem

Our knowledge of language is complex and abstract; the experience of language we receive is limited. Human minds could not create such complex knowledge on the basis of such sparse information. It must therefore come from somewhere other than the evidence they encounter.

Plato says that it originates from memories of prior existence. According to Chomsky it is the innate property of mind and sourse of data is within the mind itself.

The data in the stimulus are too thin to justify the knowledge that is built out of them, thus called „poverty-of-the-stimulus’ argument.

4 stages to the poverty of the stimulus argument (Cook, 1991)

The principles and parameters theory and language acquisition

Universal Grammar is present in the child‟s mind as a system of principles and parameters. The principles of UG are principles of initial state, S0,

The Projection Principle, Binding, Government and the others are the built-in structure of the language faculty in the human mind.

These principles are not learnt so much as applied. Parameter-setting allows the child to acquire the

circumscribed variation between languages. A speaker of English has set the head parameter to head-first, a Japanese to head-last . Acquiring a language means setting all the parameters of UG appropriately. As we have seen, they are limited in number but powerful in their effects. (Cont.)

Grammatical competence is a mixture of universal principals, values of parameters and lexical information, with an additional component peripheral knowledge. Some of it has been present in the speaker‟s mind from the beginning; some of it comes from experiences that have set values for parameters and led to the acquisition of lexical knowledge.

According to Chomsky „what we “know innately” are the principles of various subsystems of S0and the manner of their interaction, and the parameters associated with these principles. What we learn are the values of the parameters and the elements of the periphery.‟

Ex.1 His father plays tennis with him in the summer.

Ex.2 Kare wa tegami o eki de yomimasu.He letter station on read.He read the letter on the station.

The ‘Evidence’ available toL1 learner

Requirements on the language evidence for the child

•In principle children must be able to learn languagesimply from examples of language spoken byothers (Positive evidence), without corrections orexplanation etc. ( Negative evidence)

Positive Evidence Requirement

•Any type of evidence needed by the child must beshown to occur in normal language situations, forexample correction does not normally occur.

Occurrence

Requirement

•The type of evidence must be available uniformlyto all children regardless of variations in cultureclass etc.

Uniformity Requirement

•Children must be shown actually to make use ofthis type of evidence.Take-up Requirement