It appears that Chomsky proposes new theories without much empirical evidence. In his innateness theory, he said that children face poverty of stimulus. But there is no evidence to say that children actually face this problem. Unlike the minds of the adults, the minds of the children are not cluttered. An uncluttered mind can take more input and absorb it. This might be the reason behind the ability of the infants in internalizing their mother tongue at a rapid pace. Moreover language is not something which remains static. It keeps changing. It evolves constantly and continuously. So the question is how does this dynamic information get coded into the human genes? Many cognitive scientists who support innateness hypothesis claim that infants have LAD (Language Acquisition Device) in their brains. As a result of this they acquire the ability to speak the language by the time they are three years old, but they fail to read and write. But to what extent this argument is sensible is a matter of debate. It is a well known fact that children get exposed to auditory input of the language but they don’t have access to visual input of the language. If we expose the children to visual input like written text with appropriate and attractive illustrations, will they be able to read small sentences by the time they are three years old? This is a question which requires long term research and gathering empirical evidence.
Vemireddy Ramachandra Reddy wrote:
> I think that Chomsky's innateness theory doesn't have any empirical evidence.
I've compiled pross and cons. In a nutshell: there seems to be a basic
triple language (e.g. subject object verb, Yoda speak). Whales and singing
birds can do recursion. Chimps have a language-ready brain.
http://www.augos.com/diverses/Gehirn-Universalgrammatik.html
Regards,
Joachim
I think that is not that easy to criticate someone like Chomsky... to do that way, we need to put his discussion or hypothesis in the context wich its discussed in... other way we gone had a limited point of views on his approuch...!
I agree with Reginaldo. Besides, if you expose children to written stimulus they are able to read soon.
Something must be at least "innate", otherwise also "mice" or "rats" could learn a human language, provided they
get enough (sensible, rich, or whatever) input ! What about apes? Why can the still not speak like humans after having been trained so much in experiments?
Some basic nature programme must be there which then is extended (learned) a lot by experience and exposure! Probably an "intermix" between nature & nurture is the case?
The issue should be discussed in more detail and with a cautious constructivist perspective: The question is not "Innateness yes or no". As we can see from the discussion, every participant agrees upon that "there is something innate". The problem with Generative Grammar is its model of innateness and some axioms or presuppositions. One of the major completely inadequate assumptions is the "poverty of stimulus": When we look at ontogeny, we see which effort has to be invested into learning of the language by every child and its human environment. The "poverty of stimulus" argument serves as a crucial argument for important parts of the model then: Because the hypotheses deny that children can detect and learn patterns from the "poor stimulus", there has to be an "apparatus" (the LAD) which produces syntactic patterns. Once we take away the false precondition, we will see that children very well can learn the patterns of their language(s) by using their cognitive (partially innate!) abilities.
Another basically wrong way is the "constraints"-principle: As the syntactic apparatus is too strong and produces many patterns whcih do not appear in reality, GG needs filters to sort out the "wrong" ones. Compare that to any organism system: Our body does not produce thousands of enzymes, 90% of which have to be removed by "filters" because they would be dangerous or useless. Our body produces what it needs (in principle). The same hypothesis should be taken for the language we learn.
I do not deny that Chomsky brought a lot of main ideas to linguistics, e.g. the rule concept, or that (morpho)syntax is a central evolutionary advantage. But his concentration on a syntactic basis of language which then needs a "logical" component in order to create meaning is reverse to the reality of human communication by means of communicating via the coding of combinations of concepts.
I think that we can take a general epistemologic principle in order to get a more adequate model of language: It is the more desirable concept, first to look for language abilities which emerge from general cognitive abilities (including a genetic adaptation to language learning!). Only if we are not able to explain some aspects of language by going back to the general cognitive abilities, we should look for language specific "modules" or similar.
I have a problem with the poverty of stimulus hypothesis as most utterances whether by a child or an adult do need to be understood by the hearer. There is a simple feedback structure that can re-enforce a correctly formed utterance or point out an incorrectly formed one. If the utterance is not coherent or hearer does not understand the pronunciation they will say will ask the utterance to be repeated or clarified. This trial and error pattern could allow the child to learn the basic rules and develop their language skills over a period of time. This needs to be tested further as it is the level of the poverty of stimulus that is the problem.
"Chinese is a great language with which to measure all languages because the writing has a 4,000-year documented record. No other language can claim this."
Though I like some of Jennifer's ideas, this assertion is completely false. Readable Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian texts date back to 3000 B.C. or so, whereas for Chinese, at best we can affirm that some of today's Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty of about 1200–1050 BC, though we don't know what the underlying language might look like by way of morphophonology or syntax nor are there any "readable" texts for that period. This all means is that it is far more easier to link the semitic languages of today (Arabic, Hebrew, and so on) to the 5,000-year old Akkadian with reliable texts contemporaneous with Sumerian than linking the modern Chinese languages to any reliable form of Proto-Chinese.
On the other hand, the Chinese character system of writing is the oldest logographic system still in use (uninterrupted for the last 2000 years, with clearly readable texts) and could ultimately be used to write any language, even English.
Maybe we should consider the notion of a universal grammar as well in this discussion. The concept of the LAD is an interesting and does provide clues as to how language is acquired by first language learners. Moreover, this theory is supported by the poverty stimulus notion as well.
Poverty of stimulus: Maybe it'll be useful to read Chomsky's latest stand on the issue?
http://www.stiftung-jgsp.uni-mainz.de/Bilder_allgemein/Mainz_transcript_edited.pdf
language acquisition device
noun Psycholinguistics.
a hypothesized innate mental faculty present in infants that enables them to construct and internalize the grammar of their native language on the basis of the limited and fragmentary language input to which they are exposed. Abbreviation: LAD
Origin:
1960–65
is thought to have fell out of usage in some respects simply because evidence of such a black box has not been a fruitful search to date.
Is this the innateness referred to by the questioner above?
According to Henry Whitman's paper from Chomsky lecture (2010):"It became known later as the biolinguistic framework, but doesn‟t need a fancy term. It just says, let‟s
look at language in the way any scientist would look at any biological system.
Language is some biological property of human beings. As far as we know, a
species property, meaning identical across the species apart from very marginal
fringes which we call pathology. But essentially identical across the species and
unique to the species. We don‟t know of anything comparable in any other
species. So it‟s somehow a defining characteristic of humans and we should
study it like the way we study the visual system and any other system.[p.5]"
"...And where do genetically
determined elements enter into it, as distinct from others. Well, that yields
what‟s called the problem of poverty of stimulus. The poverty of stimulus just
means that there is a gap, a huge gap in fact, between the data available to the
child, and any other organism, and the competence that comes out, what‟s
known at the end. [p.5]
"And the answer to why it 6
works that way would be that there is a genetic element that incorporates
Euclidean geometry." [p.5]
His lecture appears to be an argument for the framework.
Chomsky (1980) argued that the flow of language surrounding a child—the linguistic input—is minimal and highly distorted and that it therefore cannot account for language acquisition. He hypothesized that, given this impoverished input, children's language cannot be a reproduction of adult speech; he proposed instead that the brain's language faculty induces the grammar rules from the distorted input. With these rules in place, children are able to generate grammatical utterances.
These ideas have been largely discredited, however. Various studies of language acquisition have found little evidence to support the poverty hypothesis. Pullum (1996) and Sampson (1997), for example, found no indication that parental language was deficient in any respect. Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) reported that "the speech of mothers to children is unswervingly well formed. Only one utterance out of 1500 spoken to the children was a disfluency" (p. 89). Hendriks (2004) concluded after reviewing various studies that "the language input to the child seems to be neither 'degenerate' nor 'meager'" (p. 2).
Perhaps these conclusions are obvious to anyone who actually is a parent or who has observed parents, other adults, and young children interacting, for even a casual assessment indicates that parents and other adults talk to children frequently and clearly. As Fernald (1994) and Hoff (2000) suggested, one could easily begin to suspect on the basis of such observations that some sort of biological imperative is a work, motivating parents not only to immerse infants in language but also to modify intonation and rhythm to ensure that each utterance is articulated clearly.
Contrary to Chomsky's (1980) claim that children do not reproduce the language of adults, Hart and Risely (1996) found that, by age 2, the vocabularies of the children in their study closely matched those of their parents. Haden, Haine, and Fivush (1997) had parents share narratives with their preschool children and then asked the children to retell the story later. The researchers reported that the children's narrative structure followed that of their parents.
A large body of research shows that parental input also affects syntax. Newport et al. (1977), for example, found that the frequency of auxiliary-fronted yes/no questions in parent speech directed at children was positively correlated with the development of these forms during acquisition (also see Furrow, Nelson, & Benedict, 1979). Likewise, Hoff-Ginsberg (1985, 1986) found a positive relation between mothers' use of ''wh-'' questions (which contain auxiliaries) and children's development and use of auxiliaries.
Gordon is primarily correct in what he is saying. I think, however, that many of Chomsky's thoughts and postulates, however, have added a great dimension to computer related language technologies and related communicative developments in that sphere. I am not sure why he spent so much of his life defending it. (He keeps occupied doing other things, I know. I just want to use hyperbole here and at the same time promote his overall contribution in linguistics and language research.)
Chomsky was right saying that we have something innate to acquire a language, the problem is what innate is not a template of language-specicific principles and parameters but the architectural and Chronotopic Development of the human brain in Ontogeny which channels the human infant's attention to the language around say Charles N. Li and Jean-Marie Hombert in their paper in the book Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language . It means that when the time comes for the neurons in the sound related areas of the brain to make connections, human infants pay great attention to the sound around, particularly the human voice and starts to connect it to the social behaviour and comes the miracle of learning a complex symbolic behaviour.
As it is, I was able to read by the age of three though this is no argument when evaluating what the POV index is all about or how high the POV index has to be before creolizing effects in first language transmission are maximized.