PSY 2105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Psychological Nativism, Language Acquisition Device, Transformational Grammar

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2105
• Professor: Stuart Hammond

Document Summary

Productivity: the property of language that permits humans to produce and comprehend an infinite number of statements. An argument for language not being purely genetic is that language is used in a variety of tongues. Not only this but languages have all sorts of different grammatical structures. Your race doesn"t matter, you will grow up speaking the language that you are taught. Theoretical approaches to language cover the 4 basic traditions: biological, cognitive, sociocultural, environmental/learning. Nativist theory: theory of language development, originated by chomsky, that stresses innate mechanisms separate from cognitive processes. Heavy emphasis put on inborn processes and biological mechanisms. Must have biological roots because children learn language so easily and fast while their other cognitive processes are quite immature reasons: Ruled out reward/punishment/imitation means for language development for a few: adults don"t reward children from the accuracy of their speech, can"t be imitation if they are making their own errors (cid:523)(cid:498)) broked it(cid:499)(cid:524)