PSYC 11762 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Psychological Nativism, Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky

• School: Kent State University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 11762
• Professor: Christopher Flessner

Document Summary

Inborn universal grammar: chomsky (1959, 1987) opposed skinners ideas and suggested that rate of language acquisition is so fast that it cannot be explained through learning principles, and thus most of it was inborn. Chomsky"s theory is that language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our brains have for certain structures of language. -referred to as nativist theory: theories of language development, statistical learning and critical periods: we learn to recognize breaks in words before our first birthday. These statistical analysis are learned during critical periods of child development and if go unstimulated, will lose ability to fully master language. Hopi, he noted, did not have past tense for verbs therefore hopis could not think readily about the past. Indigenous peoples near the arctic circle (not eskimos) have 50 words for snow : language influences thinking, when a language provides words for objects or events we can think about these objects more clearly and retain them.