A Brief Overview Of Piaget’s And Chomsky’s Theories
In the study of how language is acquired, Piaget, who was a cognitive developmentalist, discussed his theory in terms of the links between cognitive development and the development of various aspects of language (Piaget, 1980). Piaget believed that language has a complex structure, which emerges as a result of continuing interaction between children’s current level of cognitive functioning and their current linguistic and non-linguistic environment (Bohannon, 1993). This interactive approach is known as Piagetian Constructivism (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980). On the other hand, Chomsky, who was a nativist and also a psycholinguist, disagreed with Piaget’s account because he viewed cognition and language as relatively separate but related abilities (Gardner, 1980). Chomsky commented that the general mechanisms of cognitive development could not account for the abstract, complex, and language-specific structures of language. Moreover, he stated that the linguistic environment was also unable to account for the structures that appear in children’s language. He claimed that the environment played at most as triggering role, and shaping mechanism in the maturation of language (Gardner, 1980). Therefore, he concluded that “language or at least aspects of linguistic rules and structure must be innate” (Bohannon, 1993, p.262). This nativist approach is called Chomskian Innatism (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980).
The Differences Between Piaget’s And Chomsky’s Accounts On Syntax
The first clear-cut difference between Piaget’s and Chomsky’s accounts can be seen in the acquisition of syntax, a central component of language. Syntax refers to the form, or structure, of a language - “the rules that specify how words are combined to form meaningful sentences” (Shaffer, 1993, p.363). Chomsky’s approach has put emphasis on a set of grammatical rules that would generate syntactic descriptions for all of the permissible and non permissible sentences in any given language (Gardner, 1980). Chomsky argued that an adequate grammar must be generative or creative in order to account for the myriad of sentences that speakers can produce and understand. He also believed that a true grammar should describe the speaker’s knowledge of all permissible utterances (competence) rather than just the utterances typically produced (performance) (Bohannon, 1993). Hence, he introduced a self-devised grammar known as Transformational Generative Grammar, or TGG (Chomsky, 1965).
Chomsky (1986) believed that TGG is the main constituent knowledge of language. TGG is defined as “an explicit description of the internalized rules of a language as they must have been mastered by an idealized speaker-hearer” (Sinclair-de-Zwart, 1969a, p.365). There are two major points in Chomsky’s model of generative grammar. First, he asserted that there was an innate language acquisition device (LAD), which provides the basis for human linguistic competence. Chomsky proposed that the nature of LAD was like an innate “black box” which was capable of receiving linguistic input (the sentences of the language in which the child was growing up) and, from these, deriving universal grammatical rules (Garton, 1992). Once these universal grammatical rules are derived, LAD functions to yield a particular language through interaction with presented experience, that is, it helps to convert experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one (native language) or another (Chomsky, 1986). Second, he posited that each sentence had a surface structure (i.e., the actual arrangement of words that we hear or see), and a deep structure (i.e., the idea underlying the sentence) (Bohannon, 1993).
Piaget agreed with Chomsky’s theory that a true grammar aims at a system of rules rather than at a system of elements, such as, noun phrase and verb phrase (Sinclair-de-Zwart, 1969). However, Piaget claimed that a grammar was formed from the child’s interactional experiences with the environment. This involves the processes of assimilation (integration of information into existing scheme) and accommodation (creation of new scheme or modification of existing scheme) which underlie all cognitive growth (Piaget, 1959). Piaget (1971, p.75) also claimed that “the syntax and semantics of a language yield a set of rules to which any individual speaking that language must submit, not only when he wants to express his thought to others, but even when he expresses it internally”. This clearly means that children do not go around emitting bursts of increasingly intricate syntax just for the fun of exercising their language faculty, but they have meanings to convey and negotiate. Children’s meanings must be related to their conceptual understanding, and this conceptual understanding is a reflection of their cognitive (and intellectual) development (Durkin, 1995).
Overall, in terms of syntax, Chomsky’s arguments that language is an innate and species-specific faculty stand up quite outstandingly (Durkin, 1995). Chomsky’s approach also holds that all languages share the same rules at the level of deep structure, suggesting that grammatical relations in the deep structure are linguistically universals. In contrast, Piagetian view partly supports Chomsky’s account: Piaget agreed that language is a species-specific behavior on the extent that it depends on the intellectual character of humans. The higher the degree of children’s intellectual character, the higher the degree of their language proficiency that is reflected in their linguistic skills.
The Differences Between Piaget’s And Chomsky’s Account On Semantics
The second area of disagreement between Piaget and Chomsky is in semantics. Semantic refers to “the expressed meaning of words and sentences” (Shaffer, 1993, p.363). Clearly, children must recognize that words convey meaning - that words refer to particular objects, actions, and relations - before they will comprehend the speech of others and be understood when they speak. Chomsky postulated that the semantic component determines the semantic interpretation of a sentence - it relates a structure generated by the syntactic component to a certain semantic representation (Chomsky, 1965). He claimed that this semantic component is inter-related to the phonological component (which determines the phonetic form of a sentence generated by the syntactic rules) of a grammar. Both the semantic and phonological components are therefore purely interpretive. Each utilizes information provided by the syntactive concerning formatives, their inherent properties, and their interrelations in a given sentence. Consequently, the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation (Chomsky 1965).
Unlike Chomsky, Piaget considered the role played by the semantic component of a language as the most important. The Piagetian approach stresses the concept of cognitive determinism, that is, “the developmental order of language encoding of semantics relationships reflects the order of cognitive structures” (Owens, 1988, p.47). Piaget believed that as children’s cognitive capacities progress, so does their semantic understanding of the world (Piaget, 1959). This claim is supported by the Piagetian studies, which demonstrates that the semantic concepts that children express are present in their thoughts and actions (Owen, 1988). For example, children demonstrate a concept of object permanence, or of the existence of an object that cannot be seen, before they express relationships such as appearance, disappearance, and nonexistence in their speech. Another example comes from Piaget’s conservation tasks in which the children show their understanding of the meaning of the terms like ‘more than’, less than’, and ‘as much as’ through their performance in the tasks (Durkin, 1995). In sum, according to Piaget, children did not learn language and then use it to express cognition-environment relationships; rather, they learned entity relationships and expressed that knowledge in the language they learned subsequently (Owen, 1988).
Chomsky, on the other hand, agreed that children did all sorts of other things and developed all sorts of other abilities that were synchronous with or immediately preceding the appearance of language, but this did not prove that language, in any way, depended on them (Chomsky, 1980). He further argued that blind children or even paraplegics show no significant impairment in their linguistic performance. It seems that Chomsky’s argument bears some truth in it because recent studies have shown that positive correlations between cognitive and linguistic achievements are often taken as reflections of causal relationships. Yet, correlation does not always infer causation (Bohannon, 1993).
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is hypothesized that the above discussion may help to resolve the issue on language acquisition, which has been debated since early 1970s. It could be argued that why Chomsky considered language and cognition (including intellectual character of the mind) as separate entities is because his approach to language acquisition is heavily based on the acquisition of syntax. There is substantial evidence that shows the syntactic component of a language is innate and species-specific but not its semantic counterpart (Curtiss, 1977, 1981, as cited in Bohannon, 1993). However, Piaget’s approach seems to provide strong arguments in relation to semantics. Therefore, it is undeniable that Piaget viewed language and cognition as interrelated because he believed that the attainment of meanings relies heavily on the continuous interaction between children’s hereditary structure and their environment. This provides some evidence that each theory has a place in language acquisition. Could it be that in reality the two approaches are not contradictory, as claimed by most people, but parallel in explanations since both try to explain the same thing but based on totally different grounds? This is yet another issue that needs to be resolved in the future.
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