Journal review Making sense of syntax, Contrasting Universal Grammar with other approaches to language acquisition.

Making sense of syntax, Contrasting Universal Grammar with other approaches to language acquisition.

Expert :

Noam Chomsky
Chomsky in 2015
Born	Avram Noam Chomsky December 7, 1928 (age 88) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Fields	Linguistics, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, political criticism
Institutions	·         MIT (1955–present) ·         Institute for Advanced Study (1958–1959)
Alma mater	·         University of Pennsylvania ·         Harvard Society of Fellows
Thesis	Transformational Analysis (1955)

 

Reviewed By : YUNDRI

Pekanbaru : University Of Lancang Kuning Riau.

       

      This article will review journal that present a complex Making sense of syntax, Contrasting Universal Grammar with other approaches to language acquisition. Proponents of a Universal Grammar approach argue that humans are born with a dedicated language system that shapes and restricts the number of grammars found in human languages (Chomsky, 2005). It is essentially innate and has a genetic manifestation. Such an innate system is necessary because human grammars are too complex to be passed on through social interactions and probabilistic learning.

Introduction

Learning to understand a language is a task of seemingly incredible complexity, which appears to be almost infinitely complex from an infants perspective. But the fact that children are indeed capable of acquiring a complex, arbitrary language that makes extensive use of grammar to convey meaning, requires an explantion with regard to the developmental and evolutionary origins of the human language capacity. Put rather bluntly, why is it that a typically developing human infant can acquire language, but her pet kitten cannot? (Yang, 2004, p. 451) Currently, there are a number of different approaches that try to explain the processes used by infants to decipher language by acquiring new words and learning the grammar of their language. The predominant approach of the last 50 years has been that children have an innate sense for grammar and syntax, shared by all humans—a Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 2005). The Universal Grammar approach is part of Chomsky's generative view of language acquisition (cf. V. Evans & Green, 2006).  

Language Universals

Universal Grammar is a biolinguistic approach to language acquisition and usage (Chomsky, 2005). The language model proposed by nativists is domain-specific; the cognitive processes underlying language processing differ qualitatively from other learning processes used by the child to understand the environment (Chater & Manning, 2006). later revisions of Chomsky's theory argue that Universal Grammar would serve as a preselector for all the available grammars, and depending on the socio-lingual context, the appropriate syntaxes would be acquired by the infant (Yang, 2004; Chomsky, 2005). Hence, Universal Grammar restricts possible human syntaxes, but still allows room for variation. Thus, it is argued that children explore possible options and gradually tune it to the adults (Crain, Goro, & Thornton, 2006). 

According to the nativist view of Universal Grammar, these achievements would be impossible without an innate and Universal Grammar: The language stimuli that children are exposed to are simply too noisy and incomplete to allow for reliable understanding of language through induction. Thus, much of the support for an innate Universal Grammar is drawn from the observation that children are exposed to impoverished language stimuli. Whilst Universal Grammar allows for probabilistic and social learning to acquire language-specific rules, it states that this would not be possible without an innate knowledge of the syntactic and phonological structure (Yang, 2004; Chomsky, 2005).  (2008) found that children learnt irregular forms of artificial verbs and noun plurals through negative evidence, and interestingly there was an interaction of word form and age: In 3 year old infants, negative evidence proved to be more effective for noun plurals, whilst 5 year olds used it for verbs more than nouns.

A central part in the debate for and against a Universal Grammar is whether or not a child is capable of deducing a grammatical structure from the input. However, proponents of a social view of language acquisition suggest that social cues give sufficient infant-directed speech certain properties that facilitate language learning (Uther, Knoll, & Burnham, 2007; Goldstein & Schwade, 2009; Saxton, 2000; Saxton et al., 2005; Kuhl, 2004). A comparison of infant-directed speech and foreigner-directed speech by Uther et al. (2007) has shown that they both share features, such as vowel-hyperarticulation, which are important in making sense of language.

Repetitions alone would not give sufficient variation of input. However, parents offer the child a series of variation sets by repeating utterances with small changes, leading to changes in the syntactical structure but not the content.

 

For example (taken from Brodsky et al. 2007)

You got to push them to school.
Push them.
Push them to school.
Take them to school.
You got to take them to school. 

such variations would be ideal for the childs word and syntax acquisition process. And indeed, Kntay and Slobin (1996) found that they make up 20 % of child-directed speech in Turkish. In an analysis of childrens speech, it was found that there is a high correlation with parents variation sets and subsequent language and syntax use in children (Brodsky et al. , 2007). In a quantitative analysis of motherese, Brodsky et al. (2007) were able to construct an algorithm capable of acquiring a relatively high-coverage of generative grammar. that some of the grammatical features are simply more common because they are more readily acquired by probabilistic learning processes. Taken together, this evidence suggests that social interactions play a major role in language acquisition, a view for which early approaches to Universal Grammar only left little room (Chomsky, 2005).

 

Evidence from Language Evolution

Universal Grammar is assumed to be expressed through genes. A distinct linguistic system would have evolved through natural selection; for example, favouring a mutation that led to the rewiring of neural networks to accommodate basic syntactical structures . and than gene-culture co-evolutionary account would favour general learning rules over linguistic, , and further research is necessary to generalize these findings to more complex syntaxes. (Chomsky, 2005).

Conclusion

Language Acquisition

To understand what precisely this difference is is to give ‘a rational account of this behavior, i.e., a theory of the speaker’s linguistic intuition . . . the goal of linguistic theory’ (Chomsky  1995/1975: 95)—in other words, a psychology, and ultimately, biology of human language. Once this position—lately dubbed the biolinguistic approach (Jenkins 1999, Chomsky 2000)—is accepted, it follows that language, just like all other biological objects, ought to be studied following the standard methodology in natural sciences (Chomsky  1975, 1980, 1986, 1995a). The postulation of innate linguistic knowledge, the Universal Grammar (UG), is a case in point. One of the major motivations for innateness of linguistic knowledge comes from the Argument from the Poverty of Stimulus (APS) (Chomsky, 1980). A well-known example concerns the structure dependency in language syntax and children’s knowledge of it in the absence of learning experience (Chomsky 1975, Crain & Nakayama 1987).

 

References

Chomsky  1995/1975: 95 . Jenkins 1999, Chomsky 2000 .Brodsky, P., Waterfall, H. R., & Edelman, S. (2007). Characterizing motherese: On the computational structure of child-directed language. In D. S. McNamara & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Cognitive Science Society Conference (pp. 833838).
Brown, R., & Hanlon, C. (1970). Cognition and the development of language. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Proceedings from Fourth Annual Symposium on Developmental Linguistics, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh Pa., April 1112, 1968 (pp. 1153). New York: Wiley.
Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2009). Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34 (7), 11311157 . doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01049.x
Chater, N., & Manning, C. D. (2006). Probabilistic models of language processing