Chomsky's Theory Of Language Acquisition

Language is a fundamental aspect of human interaction and societal growth; however, its origins within cognition are still not completely understood and remain debatable. One of the most historically accepted explanations of language acquisition proposes that language is an innate characteristic within humans. This hypothesis suggests that language is unique to human cognition in that there is a specialized, genetic predisposition for humans to acquire language and individuals are born with a unique faculty to identify and understand language patterns and grammatical structures. The issue with such proposition is the fixation on indemonstrable, preprogrammed language-specific faculties within the brain. Instead, it is more likely that language

He hypothesized that human brains contain a "genetically determined language faculty" (Knowledge of Language 3). referred to as a "language acquisition device (LAD)" in order to account for this disparity. The LAD is proposed to be responsible for language organization which implies that knowledge of specific sentence structure and syntax is hardwired into the brain during development within the womb. As a result, Chomsky suggests that Universal Grammar (UG), or sets of grammatical rules common in most languages, is a priori knowledge integral for

Everett have criticized the imprecise nature of Chomskyian UG. Everett 's work with the Pirahã people suggests that language is not a genetic human process but a tool invented to aid problem solving (Everett 28). One line of evidence supporting this claim examines how the construction of the Pirahã language vastly differs than any other language in existence which directly challenges the concept of UG. The language has characteristics such as "[an] absence of numbers, [an] absence of counting and colors, refusal to talk about the distant past or the distant future...special characteristic of recursion, [and] the ability to keep a process going in the syntax forever" (McCrum) which are constrained by culture and community. The stark difference between Pirahã and other languages suggest that there is a different mechanism to language than Chomsky