Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the argument that children have an innate capacity for language. What other explanations of language acquisition by children have been offered?

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Chiara Giovanni 12Y

Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the argument that children have an innate capacity for language. What other explanations of language acquisition by children have been offered?

Language acquisition in children is undoubtedly a complex process and has fascinated people all over the world since languages fully developed. Most early endeavours to investigate language were mainly attempting to find the “original” language, such as the experiment by Pharaoh Psammeticus in the 7th century BC. The Pharaoh believed language was inborn and to prove his point, isolated two children to see if they developed the language they had been born with. This experiment was repeated in the 15th century by King James V of Scotland and by Emperor Akhbar of 16th-centiry India. While most of these were phylogenetic as opposed to ontogenetic, the focus is clear- are babies born with the capacity for language development? The nativist theory, which does indeed argue that language is part of our evolutionary inheritance, is challenged by other key schools of thought. These include behaviourism, which follows the theory of behaviour and reinforcement, social interactionism, which states that babies are influenced by, but do not solely learn from, adults, and cognitivism, in which babies’ language is said to develop as understanding of the world grows. Although all of these theories have immense amounts of evidence to support the corresponding ideas, it remains open to debate which is most likely.

The central idea of the theory of nativism is that a child’s brain contains special language-learning mechanisms at birth. The ‘champion’ of this theory, who is most often associated with innateness, is Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), an American linguist. Chomsky believed that children must have an inborn faculty for language acquisition. According to this theory, the process is biologically determined as the brain contains linguistic information at birth; the child’s natural predisposition to learn language is thus triggered by hearing speech and the child’s brain is able to interpret what is heard according to the underlying principles or structures it already contains. This natural faculty has become known as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). There is already fundamental evidence to support the idea of LAD, such as the child’s concept of verb tense. When children overgeneralise with grammar rules (e.g. “wented”, “hitted”), Chomsky proposed that this is due to the child’s brain attempting to formulate a single grammatical structure, not taking into account the common irregularities in the English language. Other evidence to support the idea of innateness includes the identification of a specialised vocal tract which allows the precise articulation of a wide range of vocal sounds. Neuro-science has also identified specific areas of the brain with distinctly linguistic functions, suggesting that humans are biologically set apart from animals, as we are “programmed” to acquire vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Creole speakers, who turned pidgin into a full language, and children who use sign language, both go through similar stages of LA as “normal” children, suggesting too that the human brain actively searches for any form of language.

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There are, of course, many limitations of the nativist theory. Not only was Chomsky primarily interested in grammar, he neglected to take into account the interaction between children and their carers, which is essential in explaining why a child might want to speak or the functions of language. The aforementioned studies on isolated children all produced the same result: the children did not develop language. Some “babbling” sounds were seized on and reported to belong to languages such as Hebrew, but this is mainly due to the phylogenetic nature of these studies. Additionally, the very famous Bard and Sachs ...

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