LINA02H3 Midterm: Midterm study guide - language acquisition.docx
Document Summary
The generativist hypothesis is that language is a biological faculty, a type of innateness. This is supported by cross-linguistic uniformity of language development: acquisition of language is the same throughout all languages. Children go through basically the same developmental steps. The diversity of languages and the fact that the children are learn them shows that children have an innateness for language. The universality of complex language: language acquisition of all humans and the biological basis of the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. The behaviourists believed that children learned language by believed that language was learned through a process called stimulus-response learning (this grouped together all types of behaviour) This meant that children learnt through copying whatever is said to them. Children could not learn independently or create new sentences. Chomsky disagreed with this idea (and his idea has been proven to be mostly right) based on:
