LING 2010Q Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Corrective Feedback, Linguistic Competence, Language Acquisition
Document Summary
Linguistic competence : a theory of linguistic competence must account for the infinite creative capacity of human languages (the property of recursion) Generative linguistics (principles and parameters): a genetically determined cognitive faculty determines universal properties of human languages and the limits of variation. Language acquisition (and the poverty of the stimulus): the linguistic environment does not provide all the information a child needs in order to build a mental grammar. A language - specific learning mechanism is invoked. Child: mama isn"t boy, he is girl i: mom: that is right, children tune out explicit corrections: e. In many cultures, there is no motherese at all: yet, children will uniformly acquire language. Language acquisition is successful despite the poverty of the stimulus. Alternative learning strategies fail to make up for the missing information. That suggests the existence of an innate mechanism guiding children through language acquisition.
