Theory of Nativism

Theory of Nativism

The Scope of Study

The behaviourist theory of child language acquisition was firmly disputed especially after the coming up of Chomsky’s theory in (1968). In his theory of nativism Chomsky suggests that the human brain is innately wired to learn language. The theory states that language acquisition device (LAD) which he defines as the “Universal Innate Ability or Grammar) is responsible for the child’s capability to construct his grammar in an orderly fashion and to produce speech. In this respect Kearns (2017: 151) points out that:

Chomsky’s nativist theory of language development suggests children are equipped with language skills at birth which are activated as the child matures. Chomsky describes language as “unfolding” as child matures. He believed there were “universal principles” built into the brain and that the child was preprogrammed to learn language. He used the term language acquisition device (LAD) to describe the special biological brain mechanism.

Correspondingly, Chomsky’s view insists on that children cannot learn something as complex as human language in a very short period without the hardwired (genetically determined) grammatical structure of language in their brain prior their contact with language i.e. before hearing the language of their caregivers. Likewise, Chomsky‟s nativist theory claims that the language the child hears is not enough to explain the development of the language rules he learns. An instance of that, is the common use of wrong rules by infants such as “The cats eated the mouses” instead of the “cats ate the mice”. Certainly, children may not hear their caregivers say something like “eated”or “mouses”.

This case sustains the idea that language cannot be learned only through imitation and if we approach the sentence and analyze it we may find that though the sentence is incorrect grammatically, it can be considered to be correct to a certain extent. In other terms, the past tense of regular verbs necessitate “ed” in the English language and an “s” for the plural forms. Nevertheless, there are exceptions of irregular verbs and plurals into the bargain. Thus, when children make this kind of grammatical errors, it is clear that they have learned a pattern and utilize with other words which do not follow the same rule. This process according to Chomsky is called overregularization/ generalization where children are creating their own grammar and this sustains the idea that the basic elements of grammar are innate.