二语习得Chomsky

Chomsky’s classic theories to language acquisition
The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument
The stimulus or input available to children is impoveriomplex, but the input children receive is a small fraction. • Children can understand and produce utterances
• Neuro-science has also identified specific areas of the brain with distinctly linguistic functions, notably Broca's area (just above the left ear) and Wernicke's area (around under the left ear).
“How do we come to have such rich and
specific knowledge, or such intricate systems belief and understanding, when the evidence available to us is so meagre?”
that they haven’t heard.
• The input available to children is not a perfect
model for learning the language.
The logical problem of language acquisition
2. Attempts to Teach Non-human Animals Languages • Experiments aimed at teaching non-human animals such as apes, parrots to communicate with human languages have proved that only human beings are endowed with a quite rich set of innate ability to language acquisition. Animals can not acquire languages like human children.
Nativism (Mentalism)
Central claim
• Human language acquisition is because of an innate, distinctive and human-only biological endowment. In other words, human beings are genetically endowed with special ability to language acquisition which is unconnected to other learning capacities.
5. The formation of Creoles
• The formation of creoles varieties of English seems to be the result of UG at work.
Universal Grammar and SLA
• Language acquisition( first and second) would be impossible without such endowment because the input data are insufficient to allow acquisition occur. • In principle, the UG model could be extended to take in other languages, that is, a second set of primary linguistic data go into the black box, a send grammar comes out, as follows:
Chomsky, 1987
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Chomsky’s LAD was grew out of a germ which metaphorically regarded “the built-in structure” of human mind as a black-box.
3. language capacity is largely separate from general intelligence.
• There are a lot of evidence from children with cognitive deficits but with normal language development or vis versa.
The core of Chomskyan approach: Young children must have some special ability, some special endowment, something which is present in the mind of the baby already at birth and which enables them to tackle the huge task of learning the mother tongue. It is what we call a “domain specific” faculty.
4. Critical Period Hypothesis
• Central claims: the capacity to learn a language is limited to the years before puberty and after which humans lose this innate language ability as a result of hemispheric lateralization and the loss of brain plasticity. • Critical period: 5 years (Krashen, 1973), 6 years (Pinker, 1994), 12 years (Lenneberg, 1967), 15 years (Johnson and Newport, 1989).
Universal Grammar is the black box responsible for language acquisition. It is the mechanism in the mind which allows children to construct a grammar out of the raw language materials supplied by their parents. (Cook, 1997:262)
Universal Grammar
• UG is genetically determined “mental organ” , as Chomsky calls, that grows by itself. • Most researchers see the LAD as synonymous with Universal Grammar.
According to UG approach, all human languages inherit a universal set of principles and parameters. • principles: refer to the highly abstract set of grammatical rules and structures which apply to all human languages. • parameters: refer to principles that are vary in certain restricted ways from one language to another.
• Chomsky’s theories of language acquisition are the best known nativist claims among others.
Chomsky
• His classic review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Chomsky, 1959) marked the beginning of a new era in linguistics. • Chomskyan approaches to language acquisition is regarded as great advances in linguistics. Many people refer to the rise of Chomsky and the demise of Skinner as the “Chomskyan revolution”.
Evidence to support the innate theory
1. Neuro-science evidence
• The evidence of brain-damage adults demonstrates that language is not linked to other kinds of cognitive faculties. Damage to
the left hemisphere of the brain will cause language deficit, which shows that the left
hemisphere controls language for the vast majority of people (about 90 percent).
• According to Long, there are multiple critical periods, that is, different critical periods for different components of language. The period for phonology starts to decline around age 6, and the period for morphology and syntax lasts till age 15. Hence, learners starting between age 6 and age 11 can communicate fluent, but most probably will end up with phonological “accents”.
We receive limited linguistic input but our knowledge of language is complex and abstract. Human mind could not create such complex language knowledge on the basis of such sparse linguistic data.
• In fact, SLA seems not to function in this way. The well known fact is that although there are exceptional adult L2 learners who can achieve a very high level of competence in the L2, it is not possible for the vast majority of L2 learners to achieve native-like attainment in a second language. In addition, the ultimate achievement that L2 learners achieve differs from L1 acquisition and varies from one learner to another.