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ChomSki LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
ChomSki LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
ChomSki LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
In the 1960s, Chomsky proposed that the human capacity for language was innate. The assumptions here are that:
(a) natural-language syntax is too complex for children to learn from what they hear around them, because
(b) adults offer such a distorted and imperfect source of data. And
(c) children learn their first language so fast that they must rely on some innate capacity, specifically for syntactic
categories and syntactic structure.
As Chomsky put it, The grammar has to be discovered by the child on the basis of the data available to him,
through the use of the innate capacities with which he is endowed. Moreover the existence of a specialized built-in
language acquisition device was also proposed. The assumption is that such a device must exist to account for
the speed and universality of acquisition in normal children. Two assumptions that children acquire all the major
syntactic structures of their language very early (by age four in most accounts) and that all (normal) children acquire
language are common to variations of this position.
of knowledge of the settings of a finite number of parameters, which define exactly how the universal principles
need applying to construct grammatical sentences. If the parameters according to which languages may vary could
all be found, and a given human language could be completely described by the values it assigns to each parameter;
it would be the only human language with the parameters set in that way. To set this in example, one of the most
important principles can be the locality principle, which suggests that the element that is moved within the sentence
(as in wh-questions) cannot be too far from the sentence from which it originates. This principle is common to all
languages and such principles are the basis of universal grammar, which all humans are endowed with. Knowing
the finite number parameters will then be enough to fully know the grammar of the target language.
Therefore, UG is a universal generalization from the grammars of speakers' I-languages to the grammars of all
possible human languages, consisting of principles and parameters. Principles are universal facts about language
which are true for all languages, while parameters are rules that distinguish differences between individual
languages. For example, a principle is that all languages have subjects, and a parameter in this respect is the Null
Subject Parameter, which determines whether the subject of a sentence needs to be overtly spelled out or not In
English overt subjects are obligatory, whereas in Chinese they are not. Due to their universal nature, the parameters
are binary settings, that is, settings with only two options. Indeed, since children develop a L1 grammar at a young
age, in a short period of time and at roughly the same rate, there has to be a certain degree of simplicity and
uniformity in order to allow them to efficiently acquire their L1.