Learning a language is something that happens to a child without them even being aware of it. If an infant has only ever heard English, it will not begin to speak in Spanish. To go from the initial state to a steady, mature state is mostly based on data early in life. The initial state can mature into a multitude of steady states, based on the number of languages available. The language faculty has an initial state that is genetically determined, and unique to humans. The effort to study the relationship between sensory data and behavior, without looking at the mind/brain and its changes, is one that is doomed for failure.Ĭhomsky’s main goal is this paper is to discuss the language acquisition device and universal grammar. However, there is no direct relation between the data and what the child says. If the child had an appropriate amount of data, then it would learn Spanish. A child would not learn Spanish if it never heard Spanish before. But, there is no direct relationship between the sensory inputs that led to a change of state and the actions done by the organism. With the new state, the organism can do certain actions that it could not do in its previous state. The animal is shown new sensory inputs, leading to a change in state. An animal with a mind/brain is in a certain state. The states of the mind/brain are one of the most important parts of behavior and why people behave the way that they do. Chomsky rejects a behaviorist theory, which tried to establish a connection between stimulus situations, reinforcement, and behavior because it did not consider the states of the mind/brain. This idea was developed during the cognitive revolution, which was concerned with the states of the mind/brain that enter into thought, planning, perception, learning, and action. This faculty is only unique to humans and is common among all humans. He then discusses an empirical assumption, in which there is a specific faculty of the mind/brain that is responsible for the acquisition and use of language. It was believed that linguistics was a part of human psychology and by extension a part of human biology. He used a lot of convincing evidence to turn me away from being an empiricist.īefore Chomsky created his language acquisition theory, the study of language was trying to integrate into the natural sciences. I decided to side with Chomsky and the rationalists because Chomsky had so much evidence that he used to back up his theory of language acquisition device. After reading this paper over and over again, I think I am inclined to side with the rationalists, in that there is a language acquisition device that humans have innately. As Chomsky is a rationalist, he believes that the language acquisition device is innate to all humans, in that the device is something we are born with. Universal grammar is an innate set of principles and adjustable parameters that are common to all learnable natural languages. His theory is also known as universal grammar. So, Chomsky believes that the initial state of the language faculty is a language acquisition device that allows for humans to be able to speak in a language. He believes that the initial state of the language faculty is an input-output system that takes data as the input, and produces the knowledge of some language as the output. Chomsky is coming from a rationalist point of view on language acquisition. In Noam Chomsky’s paper “On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language”, he discusses the study of language.
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