COGS 154 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Text Segmentation, Phoneme, Language Acquisition Device

• School: UCSD
• Department: Cognitive Science
• Course: COGS 154
• Professor: Shengqi Yang

Document Summary

Chomsky (1960: children have an innate language acquisition device (lad), which enables children to abstract linguistic rules from the speech they hear. Skinner: children initially produce sounds at random and the reinforcement of appropriate sounds results in the production of recognizable words. Based on behaviorist theories of learning- operant conditioning (the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior), modeling and imitating. Language viewed as behavior learned like other skills. Shaping: explains how humans come to produce speech as parents reinforce attempts: parents also provide models of advanced language that child then imitates. Nativist theory: born to talk: noam chomsky first to propose theory that language is innate human capability, language acquisition device: brain mechanism specialized for detecting and learning rules of language. Parents provide corrective feedback as learning theory predicts. Nativists have not been successful in identifying single universal grammar.