PSYC1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Language Acquisition Device, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker

• School: University of Sydney
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC1001
• Professor: Caleb Owens

Document Summary

Critical for thinking & problem solving, socialising, cultural transmission. Phonology: the sound used by the speakers of a language. Grammar/syntax: the form or structure of a language rules for combining words into meaningful sentences. Pragmatics: the principles specifying how language is used in conversation; how discourse is structured. Grammar/syntax where biggest debates about the nature of language development have focused. Domain-general maturation and cognitive/social learning account for language. Acquisition via positive reinforcement for saying words and sentences. Frequency of maternal responsiveness at 9 months predicts language acquisition at 17 months. But chomsky: these accounts are not sufficient to explain the sophistication of language acquisition. Humans have an inborn capacity for language learning, a language acquisition device (lad) - a set of perceptual and cognitive abilities that analyse linguistic input. Reinforcement learning (proposed by behaviourist) and learning through action mechanisms (as proposed by piaget) cannot explain the acquisition of human language.