General Concepts of language acquisition.

1. GENERAL IDEAS OF
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
By:
ABDUL MOMIN
&
MUHAMMAD AMIR

2. Language Before Noam Chomsky



Before
Chomsky,
Language
was
considered as behavior not knowledge, as
incorporated in the structuralists linguists
best known from Bloomfield‟s book
Language.(Bloomfield 1933)
The adult is a crucial part of Language
Acquisition Process; the child would never
learn to use any word without the adult‟s
reaction and reinforcement.
The Bloomfieldian version of language
acquisition was the commonplace of lingusitics
before Chomsky.
(Cont.)

3. Chomsky repudiated behaviorist theory of
B.F.Skinner.
 According
to
Skinner,
Language
is
determined by stimuli consisting of specific
attributes of the situation, by responses
the stimuli call up in the organism, and by
reinforcing
stimuli
that
are
their
consequences. (e.g., Milk-Deprivation)
 As with Bloomfield , Language originates
from a physical need and is a means to a
physical end. The parents‟ provision of
reinforcement is a vital part of the process.


4. CHOMSKY’s Views of Language





Creativity is the key notion for Chomsky.
People regularly understand and produce
sentences that they have never heard before.
Stimulus is not always as simple as milk
deprivation. What would be the response of a
person looking at a painting. He might say
Dutch or Clashes with the wallpaper, I think you
like abstract art, Never saw it before, Tilted,
Hanging too low, Dull, Beautiful, Awesome,
Stunning, or any thing else comes to mind.
One stimulus apparently has many responses.
There can be no certain prediction from
stimulus to response.
(Cont.)

5. 



In other words, human language is basically
unpredictable from the stimulus.
The important thing about language is that it
is stimulus-free not stimulus-bound. We can
say anything anywhere without being
controlled by precise stimuli.
The children rarely encounters appropriate
external rewards or punishment; „it is not
true that children can learn language only
through “meticulous care” on the part of
adults who shape their verbal repertoire
through careful differential reinforcement‟
(Chomsky, 1959, p42)
We cannot simply predict a particular
response from any particular stimulus.

6. STATES OF LANGUAGE FACULTY



Chomsky has conceptualized language in terms of
initial and final „states‟ of the mind‟. In the
beginning is the mind of new-born baby who
knows no language, termed the initial or zero
state, S0.
At the end is the adult native speaker with full
knowledge of language. This final state is static
and competence is essentially complete and
unchanging once it has been attained. The adult
native speaker‟s knowledge is therefore termed as
the steady state or Ss.
Acquiring language means progressing from not
having any language, S0 to having full
competence, Ss.
S0
Ss

7. Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Children hear a number of sentences said
by their parents and other caretaker- the
„primary linguistic data’; they process
these in some fashion within their black
box called the Language Acquisition
Device (LAD), and they acquire linguistic
competence i.e. a „generative grammer‟
Input
„primary linguistic data‟

Language
Acquisition
Device
Output
„generative grammar‟
It shows that LAD not only processes
input data but also add something of its
own in this raw data.

8. 3 Levels of Adequacy

9. The poverty of the stimulus argument
Plato’s Problem



Our knowledge of language is complex and
abstract; the experience of language we
receive is limited. Human minds could not
create such complex knowledge on the basis
of such sparse information. It must therefore
come from somewhere other than the
evidence they encounter.
Plato says that it originates from memories of
prior existence. According to Chomsky it is the
innate property of mind and sourse of data is
within the mind itself.
The data in the stimulus are too thin to justify
the knowledge that is built out of them, thus
called „poverty-of-the-stimulus’ argument.

10. 4 stages to the poverty of the
stimulus argument (Cook, 1991)

11. The principles and parameters
theory and language acquisition



Universal Grammar is present in the child‟s mind
as a system of principles and parameters. The
principles of UG are principles of initial state, S0,
The Projection Principle, Binding, Government and
the others are the built-in structure of the
language faculty in the human mind.
These principles are not learnt so much as applied.
Parameter-setting allows the child to acquire the
circumscribed variation between languages. A
speaker of English has set the head parameter to
head-first, a Japanese to head-last . Acquiring a
language means setting all the parameters of UG
appropriately. As we have seen, they are limited in
number but powerful in their effects.
(Cont.)

12. Grammatical competence is a mixture of
universal principals, values of parameters and
lexical information, with an additional component
peripheral knowledge. Some of it has been
present in the speaker‟s mind from the
beginning; some of it comes from experiences
that have set values for parameters and led to
the acquisition of lexical knowledge.
 According to Chomsky „what we “know innately”
are the principles of various subsystems of S0
and the manner of their interaction, and the
parameters associated with these principles.
What we learn are the values of the parameters
and the elements of the periphery.‟
 Ex.1
His father plays tennis with him in the
summer.
 Ex.2
Kare wa tegami o eki de yomimasu.

He
letter
station on
He read the letter on the station.
read.

13. The ‘Evidence’ available to
L1 learner

14. Requirements on the language
evidence for the child
Positive Evidence
Requirement
Occurrence
Requirement
•In principle children must be able to learn language
simply
from examples of language spoken by
others (Positive evidence), without corrections or
explanation etc. ( Negative evidence)
•Any type of evidence needed by the child must be
shown to occur in normal language situations, for
example correction does not normally occur.
Uniformity
Requirement
•The type of evidence must be available uniformly
to all children regardless of variations in culture
class etc.
Take-up Requirement
•Children must be shown actually to make use of
this type of evidence.