Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device

Chomsky – language acquisition 1960’s

Chomsky believes that every child has a language acquisition device. Noam Chomsky believes that the LAD (language acquisition device) concept enables a child to acquire and produce language because it is a natural mental ability. He believes LAD converts the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children then learn different/new vocabulary and relate the syntactic structures from the LAD to form different sentences. Chomsky discusses that an infant cannot learn language through imitating people because the language people use around the child is very irregular. Adult’s speech is sometimes broken up and can be ungrammatical. His theory applies to all languages as they all contain verbs, consonants, vowels and nouns and children seem to be ‘hard-wired’ to acquire the grammar. He is adamant that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language. Chomsky suggests that certain linguistic structures which children can precisely use must already be imprinted on to the infants mind. All children, regardless of their intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or six years.

Evidence to support Chomsky’s theory 

   -Children learning to speak do not usually make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.

-   -If an adult said a grammatically incorrect sentence on purpose, the child would generally recognise it

-  -Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as ‘mama ball’, which they could not of learnt from someone else

-    -Mistakes such as ‘I drawed’ instead of ‘I drew’ show they are not learning through imitation alone

      Chomsky used the sentence ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. This does not make sense but it is a grammatical sentence. To prove his theory: he believed that it shows sentences can be grammatical without having any meaning. We can recognise the difference between a grammatical and an ungrammatical sentence even if we have never heard of it before.  This shows that we can create and understand new sentences that have not been said before.

Evidence against Chomsky’s theory

People who do not believe in Chomsky’s theory say that although it is obvious that children do not learn language from just imitating people, this doesn’t prove that they have an LAD. Language learning could simply be through general learning and understanding abilities and interactions with other people.

https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/chomsky/