Noam Chomsky And Nativist Theory Of Language

Register to read the introduction… He suggests that language is an innate faculty that is to say that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. UG is the grammar of the human language, that is, the universal principles of organizing all languages. This is the reason children can accomplish cognitively a very challenging task of language acquisition even though they are still unable to do some simpler, cognitively less demanding things. Chomsky, the most eminent representative of Nativism claims that language is the organ of the mind and it develops like other organs. Humans are designed to speak. The Nativist theories focus on how the system of child language works. It tries more to describe the human language in order to understand how it is used, rather than to prescribe if the language production is wrong or right; “the child linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer “incorrect” structures, not a language in which earlier stages have more “mistakes” than later stages”______________
To summarize, behaviorists argue that everything we know we have learned through interactions with our environment. They say that, rather than being biologically predisposed to learn language, we learn language through being reinforcement. Nativism essentially says that we have an innate predisposition to learn language. Nativists argue that without such a biological predisposition, it would be impossible to learn language as quickly and as thoroughly as we do. Essentially, nativists say that the ability to learn language is inborn, whereas behaviorists say that this is entirely