LANGUAGE LEARNING NEED THEORIES UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG) Presented By: Nur Izzati Binti Abdul Hadi Wan Hazrena Fakeeza Binti Wan Zakaria Nurnajihah Binti Shafie Nor Syaliza Binti Mahmad Nasir Noorhakimah Binti Che Su
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG) Origin and Concept Proposed by Noam Chomsky
Called this knowledge Universal Grammar (UG) and sometimes also known as ‘mental grammar’.
Chomsky stated;
• We are born with some form of innate knowledge that makes language learnable. • Children are born with knowledge of UG, which constrains the learning process and, thus, makes the task of learning language possible.
CHOMSKY’S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR • For Chomsky, language acquisition is very similar. The
environment makes only a basic contribution (eg : the availability of people who speak to the child). The child, or rather, the child biological endowment, will do the rest. • Children come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language they hear.
• The language children are exposed to include false starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. • He concluded that children minds are not blank slates to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment.
CHOMSKY’S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR Chomsky said that children are born with a specific innate ability to discover the natural language they are exposed to.
This innate endowment was seen as a sort of template, containing the principles that are universal to all human languages.
If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of these principles.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD) • Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is the innate biological ability of humans to acquire and develop language. • Chomsky rejected the prevailing behaviorist theory that language (like any other behavior) was acquired through exposure to it in our environment. • He theorized that all humans share a mechanism which allows us to comprehend, develop, and use language like no other animal. • Animals raised around humans don't develop the ability to speak but humans do.
• Our capacity for language is the same all over the world in wildly different cultures and environments. • Children quickly learn language and learn in developmental stages that occur at the same age no matter what differing environments they grow up in. • Cognitive psychologists use the LAD theory as evidence to support the concept that language is both a learned and innate capability.
Video Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cgpf w4z8cw