Chomsky Language Acquisition Essay

Language acquisition is a process that humans can acquire the ability of perceive and comprehend language, as well as produce the words in order to communicate. Theorists have developed different theories to explain language acquisition. Each of them has his own view. However, Chomsky had a different view on acquisition of language, as he believed language acquisition is inborn which means that the language comes from the parents and its inherited. The theorist believes children have innate ability that enable them learn language. Children can only acquire language because they are born with the predisposition to learn language. He believes that specific linguistic structures, which children utilize so correctly, should be already imprinted on their mind. Each child has a language acquisition device (LAD). The concept of LAD is mental capacity that enables children to acquire and produce language, which is useful in learning languages. The device encodes the main principles of a language and the grammatical structures into the brain. Then children learn new vocabulary and use the syntactic structures from the language acquisition device to construct sentences. The theorist believes children cannot learn a language via imitation only as the language spoken by those around them is complex. Therefore, the capacity to learn languages exists with or without the influence of the environment. He claimed language is complex, with unlimited mixture of …show more content…
Though languages are different, they share the same grammatical characteristics. Consequently, young children can learn languages because they are born with the capability to do so. The phases of language development happen at almost similar ages in majority of the children though children experience diverse environments. In addition, language development follows the same pattern in all cultures. Children acquire langue skills faster and