Nativism And Linguistic Nativism

Linguistic Nativism: There’s Something Between the Ears

Language is something that humans use and encounter every day. Whether it be writing a paper, reading an email, talking to your best friend on the phone, or asking someone for directions, the use of language is broad and heavily intertwined with experiencing the world in the human condition. But the question of how humans come from being silent babies to speaking children is still unanswered. Linguistic nativism is one theory that addresses the question. This paper is meant to present Nativism generally, and Linguistic Nativism specifically, and the address the arguments for and against the theory.

Nativism is the view in philosophy that knowledge of some skills or information is innate and hence acquired, not learned. That is to say, nativists think that the human brain is hard wired in the sense that it has capabilities and capacities for certain things that are not learned. Linguistic Nativists believe that language is one of the capabilities that humans acquire, not learn.

According to Linguistic Nativists, humans have a sort of natural endowment that makes the human brain very well suited to acquire language. This gives a structure, which can be pictured much like a skeleton, to the brain. The skeleton gives it a form, from which task-specific parts arise. For example, human fingers allow a person to pick up objects; however, a human wouldn’t use his or her hand to chew food, since hands aren’t very adept for that task.

Linguistic Nativists argue that language takes up one of those task, or domain-specific spots of the brain. This is known as the language faculty. The Linguistic Nativist view of the language faculty is that it is the part of the brain that houses whe...

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...ite number of thoughts, feelings, and more. The infiniteness distinguishes this language from a the finite nature of sound and gestures in that important way, so this type of spoken, written language would still be the first of its sort that is acquired.

The evidence thus far seems to support, or at least favorably decorate, the theory of Linguistic nativism. Despite the limited linguistic data set that children are exposed to, or poverty of stimulus, children under normal conditions are still able to come to know language competently and fluently. And based on the similar semantic rules of other languages and the ability of improbably, unlikely sentences to still be grammatical, the Universal Grammar hypothesis also finds support. But, however we do come to be language-speaking beings, language remains an enriching and all-encompassing role in the lives of humans.