LIN200H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Formation Rule, Habituation, Universal Grammar
Document Summary
Children (usually) acquire language quickly and effortless while it difficult for adults to learn a new language, linguistic to analyze a language, or even for a computer scientist to generate an artificial language. Most children begin to talk by the time they are a year old, they start combining words as early as one and a half, and they converse in fluent grammatical sentence by 2 or 3. This ability speaks directly to the hypothesis of biological innateness: the theory that humans are biologically equipped with the knowledge of universal elements of language structure, that comes into play in the course of language acquisition. It varies considerably for example the generativists traditionally adopt the stance that what is innate (within us) is an actual language faculty: while others assume a biological basis but disagree that there is a special mental. Organ and rather frame linguistics abilities in terms of general cognitive abilities.
