Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Chomsky's approach to Language Acquisition.

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Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Chomsky’s approach to Language Acquisition.

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century.  He has made a number of claims about language, in particular he suggests that language is an innate discipline in that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the ‘Universal Grammar’.  The universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build.  In Chomsky’s early work, this takes the form of an innate structure called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

Psychologists have produced several accounts of infant language acquisition, which differ in their underlying theoretical perspectives.  Behavioural perspectives in Language acquisition identified a sequence in language development.  Skinner (1957) argued that language was learned by the child through the process of operant conditioning, a process of stimulus–response where a result occurs as a consequence of actions and that the environment in which a child lives reinforces behaviour.  Skinner suggests that the prelinguistic stage of language in which a baby cries with hunger, pain and anger at the early stages and then progresses on to cooing and babbling is reinforced by the parents, in particular the mother, by rewards such as a smile or attention.  Both Skinner and Bandura (1963) believed that this behaviourist perspective on language was based on observation and imitation by the child, although this has later been criticised by Brown and Hanlon as their studies of parent child interaction showed parents often reward of incorrect utterances and are also not able to reinforce all the utterances a child will use.  These very early stages of language acquisition are the same the world over.  De Villiers and De Villiers (1978) also stated that during this prelinguistic stage of babbling, babies produce every known phoneme that occurs in any human language.  This is a unit of sound which is narrowed down by the parent to produce random noises, which in turn produces early utterances and then moves on to the One Word Stage and Stage One Grammar.  This stage of language usually occurs between the ages of twelve and thirty months.  Initially this stage starts with one word utterances such as ‘broom’ for a car and ‘woof’ for a dog, words applied to their surrounding environment and then progresses on to simple two word sentences such as ‘mummy gone’ or ‘want milk’.

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The Biological or cognitive perspective was documented by Chomsky in 1957, in which he challenged Skinner’s approach to language on several grounds.  He argued that Skinner’s theory implied that children learn entirely through trial and error, that they try out possible utterances which they adopt if approved and reject if they do not.  He argued that children acquire language in such a short space of time, acquiring complex grammatical rules and extensive vocabulary that would not have been possible through a trial and error system.  Chomsky proposed that the child has a language acquisition device (LAD) which is an ...

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