Mentalism or Innate Theory: Mentalism theory of language
acquisition was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. This theory came up as a reaction against Behaviorism. He postulates that humans have an inborn or innate faculty for language acquisition that is biologically determined. Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Noam Chomsky, a pioneering linguist put forward an idea called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The Language Acquisition Device is a hypothetical tool in the brain that helps children understand the fundamental rules of human language. The Language Acquisition Device functions as a decoding and encoding system that provides children with a baseline understanding of the important characteristics of language. Moreover, Children make virtuous errors of grammar and language which adults do not generally make. These mistakes can give us information as to how children learn a language. For example, children have an unconscious ability to recognise the past tense and will begin to associate words ending with a /ed/ or /t/ sound with the past tense such as, ‘I goed’ rather than ‘I went’. Nobody taught them to say ‘I goed’; they figured that out for themselves. Language as a Universal Property: According to Chomsky, infants acquire grammar because it is a universal property of language, an inborn development, and has coined these fundamental grammatical ideas that all humans have in the form of universal grammar (UG). Children under the age of three typically don’t talk in complete sentences; instead, they use small phrases like ‘Want cookie’, but yet you would still not hear them say things like ‘want my’ or ‘I cookie’ because statements like this would break the syntactic structure of the phrase which is a part of universal grammar. Critical Period Hypothesis: Another argument of the nativist or innate theory is that there is a critical period for language acquisition, which is a time frame during which environmental exposure is needed to stimulate an innate trait. A Linguist Eric Lenneberg postulated that the critical period of language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He believed that if no language was learned before then, it could never be learned in a normal and functional sense. It was termed the critical period hypothesis and since then there has been a few case examples of individuals being subject to such circumstances such as the girl known as Genie who raised in an abusive environment to age 13, which didn’t allow her to develop language skills.