Key Concepts in Language Acquisition and Cognitive Theory

Empiricism vs Rationalism

  • Empiricism: All knowledge is derived from sensory experience.
  • Rationalism: Some knowledge is acquired through reason alone and can be considered innate.

Areas of Inquiry

  • The divide between empiricism and rationalism is critical in several areas:
  • Knowledge of mathematics
  • Knowledge of morality
  • Religious knowledge
  • Knowledge of language

Chomsky's Perspective on Language Knowledge

  • Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) argues that:
  • Knowledge of language entails linguistic performance.
  • This performance is a reflection of a deeper linguistic competence.

Critique of Behaviorism

  • B.F. Skinner and behaviorists view linguistic competence as explainable solely by behavioral responses to environmental stimuli.
    • Example:
    • S hears others speaking; S is taught to respond.
    • S develops speaking habits based on these interactions.
    • This leads to linguistic performance.

Acquisition of Language in Children

  • Observations about Children:
  • Children of immigrant parents can learn a language quickly from peers, achieving fluency without formal instruction.
  • They can acquire vocabulary and sentence structures from various sources like television and reading, often outperforming parents despite parents' effort to teach.
  • Children can create and understand entirely new sentence constructions they have never heard before, suggesting innate capabilities rather than solely learned behavior.
  • This challenges the idea of stimulus generalization as proposed by behaviorism.

Chomsky's Argument Against Behaviorism

  • Chomsky argues that there is no support for the behaviorist doctrine that verbal behavior must be shaped meticulously through reinforcement.
  • He perceives the need for a more profound mechanism beyond environmental feedback.

The Poverty of Stimulus Argument

  • Premise 1: If linguistic competence can be explained solely by environmental stimuli, there must be a wealth of relevant stimuli available to learners.
  • Premise 2: In reality, language acquisition occurs with a limited set of stimuli, as evident from young children's experiences.
  • Conclusion: Hence, linguistic competence cannot be adequately explained by environmental stimuli alone.

Additional Requirements for Explaining Linguistic Competence

  • To adequately explain linguistic competence:
  • A pre-existing language faculty is necessary.
  • In addition to environmental stimuli, one must also consider innate linguistic knowledge or robust reasoning capacities.

Implications if Language Faculty Exists

  • If Chomsky's language faculty theory is accurate, it substantiates rationalism, indicating that some knowledge of language is indeed innate, not merely acquired through sensory experiences.