Where Does Language Knowledge Come From?

Intelligence, Innate
Language Ideas, Behaviour?

Psycholinguistics
(Dr. Ramli, S.S., M.Pd.)

Written by :

Group 10 ( B Local 2019)

1. Aurelia Avelina (1940601053)

2. Devi Oktavia Mering (1940601081)
3. Naufal Hanifiansyah (1940601017)
4. Nur Aslina (1940601044)
5. Rafika Safitri (1040601047)
6. Sarah Putri Ramadhani (1940601048)
7. Sri Agustina (1940601054)

English Education Department

Faculty of Teacher Training and Education
Borneo University 
Tarakan
2021
Where Does Language Knowledge Come From? Intelligence, Innate Language Ideas,
Behaviour?

A. Mentalism vs. Materialism

 The Essence of Mentalism
The Mentalist holds that mind is of a different nature of matter. Thus, there are
qualitatively two kinds of substances in the universe, the material and the
mental. The understanding of mind and consciousness is essential to the
understanding of the intellectuality of human beings, particularly language.
Two basic mind and body relationships with respect to environmental stimuli
and behavioural responses in the world are : the Interactionist and the Idealist.
a. Interactionism
Body and mind are seen as interacting with one another such that one may
cause or control events in the other. An example of body affecting mind
would be the activation of a pain receptor in the body after being stuck
with a pin, resulting in a feeling of pain being experienced in the mind. An
example of mind affecting body would be when a person doing trimming
in the garden decides, in the mind, to cut down a certain plant, and then
does so.
b. Idealism
Idealism, the body and the rest of the physical world are mere
constructions
of the mind. The world exists only in the mind of conscious individuals,
with the only true substance being the mental. In a sense, subjective
Idealism is at the other extreme from radical Materialism. While for the
Materialis only matter exists, for the Idealist, only the mental exists.
  The Essence of Materialism
Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts
(including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human
history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to
them.
The psychologist John B. Watson, the founder of Behaviourism, regarded
mind and consciousness as religious superstitions that were irrelevant to the
study of psychology. For him, there was only one kind of stuff in the universe,
the material or matter and the study of physiology is the study of psychology.

B. Behaviourist wars: Materialism vs. Epiphenomenalism vs. Reductionism

 Materialism
In this view, only the physical body exists. Mind is a fiction and thus only
body should be studied.
 Epiphenomenalism
The essence of this view is that although both body and mind exist, the mind
simply reflects what is happening in the body. Since the mind has no causative
powers, the proper study of psychology is still, as Watson held, the body.
 Reductionism
As well as body, is said to exist, proponents of reductionism also believe that
mind can be reduced to the physical. For many of theorists, body and mind are
two aspects of a single reality, as the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher
Spinoza argued. (Spinoza’s view contrasts with the epiphenomenal view
which holds that body is the primary reality.)

C. Objections to Behaviourism
Chomsky (1959) raised absolutely telling arguments against Behaviourism, arguments
that brought him to a Mentalistic conception of the relationship of language and mind.
 Objections to Philosophical Functionalism
a. Insincerity and Lying
 How do we explain what it means to be insincere or lie without resorting
to a conscious intention in the mind of the speaker who made the
promise?.
Functionalist theory has only one level of analysis, the physical, there can
be no such thing as ‘insincerity’ or ‘lying’. We cannot even meaningfully
ask if a person is lying. Responsibility for actions is meaningless to
contemplate. Any system of law, and the judicial system, is rendered
virtually meaningless.
b. Dreams and Speech
How, based on a subjective experience such as a dream, can a person say
and do things related to that dream?. Physical and mental, are necessary
for an adequate explanation.
c. Toothache and Dentist
Why does a person who experiences the pain of a toothache speak about
pain and then go to the dentist’s surgery for treatment. How believable is it
that a computing device can experience anything?.
This is precisely the point that Maloney (1987) raises. The whole theory of
Functionalism is based on the premise that it is possible for the mind to be
realized in something outside of the brain. Maloney argues that until the
Functionalist can ‘certify’ (bring evidence to bear on) the possibility of a
mind without a brain, the Functionalist philosophy itself can only be
regarded as a mere possibility. Until then, Functionalism must remain in
the realm of science fiction.

D. Mentalist wars: Empiricism’s Intelligence vs. Rationalism’s Innate Ideas

 Mentalisms : Empiricism and Rationalism
a. Empiricism
A person is regarded as having a mind. This mind is related to body but is
not synonymous with it, since a mind has consciousness and consciousness
can use mind to control behaviour. In order to understand a person’s
behaviour, including speech, it is necessary to study what controls that
behaviour, that is, mind. On the existence of mind and that in their minds
humans have ideas, knowledge (‘ideas’ are often synonymous with
 ‘knowledge’ in the tradition of philosophy). Intelligence, thus, is not
considered as knowledge but as a means for acquiring knowledge.

b. Rationalism
Chomsky is the theorist who epitomizes Rationalist philosophy. Chomsky
takes the view that many basic ideas are already in the mind at birth, he
further claims that there are ideas of a distinct language nature. He calls
this set of innate language ideas ‘Universal Grammar’. Furthermore,
Chomsky claims that a particular grammar develops through certain
distinctive innate language processes of Universal Grammar. Such
processes are said to be independent of reason, logic, or intelligence.
Other modern Rationalists, like Bever (1970), however, did not separate
language from other types of ideas. Rather, Bever argued that innate ideas
are of a general nature. Such general and basic ideas in this view serve to
yield language as well as other types of knowledge such as mathematics.
But, on the other hand, the Rationalists have the problem of explaining
how any such ideas became innate in humans in the first place. Would not
innate ideas somehow have had to be gained, originally, through finite
experience? For Descartes (1641), the answer was simple, it was God who
placed ideas in the minds of human beings.

E. Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar

Some of the major arguments that Chomsky presents in support of his UG
theory. The arguments and the emphasis he places on each have changed as he has
revised his theory of grammar over the years. We will present objections to his four
main continuing arguments plus adding a new objection to the dispute. Chomsky’s
four main arguments for the necessity of UG are : (1) Degenerate, meagre, and minute
language input; (2) Ease and speed of child language acquisition; and (3) The
irrelevance of intelligence in language learning. Our additional objection to UG will
be (4) Simultaneous multilinguals and the problem of multiple settings on a single
parameter.
 Chomsky argues that children’s acquisition of a well-formed grammar of the
language, despite their being exposed to inadequate language data, is evidence of the
assistance of innate language ideas.

 Objections to Chomsky argument no. 1 : Degenerate, meagre, and minute

language input
a. Degenerate Input
A 2-year-old child is not likely to spend much time puzzling about the
complexities of passive sentences that he or she hears, even when such
sentences are grammatical. (Passive sentences are typically understood
years later.) The child takes in what it can understand and simply discards
what it cannot process.
b. Meagre and Minute Language Data as Input
As to Chomsky’s claim that only a ‘meagre’ and ‘minute sample’ of
language is experienced by the child, we are aware of no empirical
evidence which he presents to support that claim. The sentences that the
child experiences (finite though their number may be) do contain in them
an adequate representation of the syntactic structures that the child must
learn.

 Chomsky argument no. 2 : Ease and speed of child language acquisition

A young child is able to gain perfect mastery of a language with incomparably
greater ease and without any explicit instruction. Mere exposure to the
language, for a remarkably short period, seems to be all that the normal child
requires to develop the competence of the native speaker.
It is through the help of innate language ideas that the acquisition of language
is made so easy and rapid. Chomsky’s claim is, thus, that the Empiricist
cannot account for such ease and speed of acquisition.
a. Does UG weaken or die with age?
Chomsky’s argument for speed and ease of child language acquisition :
that children learn faster than adults, and that this superior speed is the
 result of the child having Universal Grammar to help out. The implication
here is that adults do not have the benefit of Universal Grammar.
Why should this be so? If adults are denied the benefit of Universal
Grammar, then Chomsky would have to argue that Universal Grammar
either weakens or dries up altogether with age. Adults would never learn a
second grammar. Yet this is not so because adults are able to learn a
second language.
 Chomsky argument no. 3: The irrelevance of intelligence in language
learning
Chomsky has contended that language learning is essentially independent of
intelligence. By this he implies that if intelligence is relevant to language
acquisition, then more intelligent people should acquire greater language
knowledge and in less time. Chomsky then concludes that different degrees of
intelligence do not affect language acquisition, and hence intelligence itself is
irrelevant to the acquisition of language.
Chomsky further speculates that our language ability and our number ability
have certain features in common, most notably the notion of ‘discrete infinity’
(to be distinguished from an innumerable mass).

 Objection no. 4: Simultaneous multilinguals and the problem of multiple

settings on a single parameter
According to Chomsky’s grammar, English is a head-first language while
Japanese is a head-last language. A child being raised in an English–Japanese
bilingual household where the child receives both English and Japanese
language input simultaneously from birth. It is commonly observed that in
such a situation the child learns these two different languages without any
special difficulty and is fluently bilingual by the age of 4 or 5 years.
By Chomsky’s definition, UG is universal and can itself account for the
acquisition of all languages. And, if it were postulated that there was a
dominating intelligence that governed what UG should do, by making
duplicates, that intelligence would have to be more powerful than UG itself.
F. Conclusion regarding Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar
If Universal Grammar exists, as Chomsky claims, as yet there is no credible evidence
that supports it. All of Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar have been
shown to be inadequate.

G. It is time for Emergentism to re-emerge?

An Empiricism which was popular in the early part of the twentieth century and has
returned in a reformulated version is one called Emergentism (Sperry, 1969;
Beckermann et al., 1992; McLaughlin, 1992). Essentially, Emergentism is based on
the view that certain higher-level properties, in particular consciousness and
intentionality, are emergent in the sense that although they appear only when certain
physical conditions occur, such properties are neither explainable nor predictable in
terms of their underlying physical properties.
Thus, mind may have some control over behaviour, which is in accord with the most
common place of human observations. It is thus highly likely that we are born with a
brain that has inherent in it physical properties that allow for the development of
intellectual processing powers.
CONCLUSION
 REFERENCE

Steinberg, D. D., & Sciarini, N. V. (2006). An Introduction To Psyhcolinguistics. Great Britain.