ALDS 2203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Wilder Penfield, 2016 American League Division Series, Critical Period

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies
• Course: ALDS 2203
• Professor: Trudy O' Brien

Document Summary

Nativism (innatism; noam chomsky: something in our brain ( black box , language acquisition device , physiological mechanism) that predisposes humans to acquire language. Poverty of stimulus argument/logical problem of language acquisition (chomsky, 1980: when learning language, children have limited access to all grammatical sentences, don"t just repeat sentences that they hear, they generate new ones, also. Nevertheless, children acquire language: quickly, effortlessly, speak similar to native speaking adults. Discovered on november 4, 1970 in la, california. Genie: a psycholinguistic study of a modern-day wild child . Found at the age of 13, extremely quiet and speechless. Neurologists wilder penfield & lamar roberts in 1959. Open window for learning, esp. language for humans. Linguist eric h. lenneberg in 1967: indirect evidence: children w/ brain injuries developed language skills much better than adults w/ similar injuries. Critical period from about 2 yrs old to puberty. Before 2 yrs old brain isn"t sufficiently mature.