Chomsky positivism

In the middle of the 20th century, American linguist Noam Chomsky explained how some aspects of language could be innate. 

Prior to this time, people tended to believe that children learn language soley by imitating the adults around them.

 Chomsky agreed that individual words must be learned by experience, but he argued that genes could code into the brain categories and organization that form the basis of grammatical structure.

 We come into the world ready to distinguish different grammatical classes, like nouns and verbs and adjectives, and sensitive to the order in which words are spoken. 

Then, using this innate sensitivity, we quickly learn from listening to our parents about how to organize our own language 

For instance, if we grow up hearing Spanish, we learn that adjectives come after nouns (el gato amarillo, where gato means “cat” and amarillo is “yellow”), but if we grow up hearing English, we learn that adjectives come first (“the yellow cat”). 

Chomsky termed this innate sensitivity that allows infants and young children to organize the abstract categories of language the language acquisition device (LAD). 

According to Chomsky’s approach, each of the many languages spoken around the world (there are between 6,000 and 8,000) is an individual example of the same underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. 

Each language, while unique, is just a set of variations on a small set of possible rule systems that the brain permits language to use.

Chomsky’s account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of grammar (including phoneme, morpheme, and syntactical rules) that determine how sentences are constructed.

 Although there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky’s idea that a universal grammar can account for all language learning. 

Other cognitive psychologists surveyed the world’s languages and found that none of the presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely universal. 

In their search they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases, that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and some that did not have nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should share these features. 

More psychologists believe that early experience can fully explain language acquisition, and Chomsky’s language acquisition device is unnecessary.

 Nevertheless, Chomsky’s work clearly laid out the many problems that had to be solved in order to adequately explain how children acquire language and why languages have the structures that they do.