NATIVISM AND

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR:
NOAM CHOMSKY
Adila
Aini
pinky
Universal
Grammar
1960s
• If children learn language by
conditioning and imitation, why
do they say things they have
never heard before?
• Why can adults make completely
novel sentences?
 WHAT IS UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR?
It is a theory that suggests that some rules
of grammar are hard-wired into the brain , and
manifest without being taught .
UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR
ARGUMENTS
1. Poverty of the Stimulus.

2.Constraints and principles cannot be learned.

3. Patterns of development are universal.

 Researchers have tried to find out whether L2
learners have access to UG or not.
Cook (1985) presented three hypotheses:
No access hypothesis:
UG is inaccessible to L2 learner
Indirect access hypothesis:
- UG is partially available to the
learners

Direct access
hypothesis: - - UG is
( Language ( Language Acquisition ( A grammar of a
data) Device) language)
 Nativism
– Evidence for the claim of complete world knowledge:
 Youngsters learn an extremely complex system (language)
effortlessly
 Youngsters learn an extremely complex system (language) in
a short amount of time
 Youngsters do not need instruction to learn their mother
tongue
 Nativism
– Infants do not hear grammar; they hear a string of
words and infer the syntactic rules language
(impoverishment of the stimulus)
– Infants often hear ungrammatical sentences, yet they
learn the grammar
 Nativism: Learning Paradox
■ Fodor’s learning paradox: one learns something only
if one knows it in advance
■ To learn a language you have to know that language
in advance
■ What you know is at a higher level than what you
learn
 Nativism
■ In the case of language, infants are born with:

 a universal grammar (UG) - a data base of grammar

 language acquisition device (LAD) - hypothesis
tester
 Nativism
■ As a consequence, it is best to build the most
powerful system so that it is there in infancy.