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The innateness hypothesis is a linguistic theory which holds the belief that language acquisition is innately determined; that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads embodied in a build- in device of some kind which makes it possible for us to acquire language (D.H. Brown 1993) The proponent of innateness theory as already pointed out was Noam Chomsky (1965). Noam Chomsky posits that humans are born with some linguistic knowledge which enables them to acquire language. This ability or innate knowledge is universal to all humans. The innate knowledge is embodied in a “little black box” of sorts, which he called a Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The LAD is equipped already at birth with specific grammatical rules and principles. These rules and principles are what help a child to learn a language.
Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis as we have seen was a reaction to the behaviorist notion that language is a set of habits that can be acquired by a process of conditioning. Chomsky argued that the behaviorist notion of conditioning is much too slow and inefficient to account for the acquisition of a phenomenon as complex as language. He contended that the existence of inner properties of language explains why a child masters his native language within such as short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language Chomsky (in D.H.Brown 1993).
Sverker Johnson (1999) gives the following arguments in favor of the innateness hypothesis:
- It is self –evident that there’s some innate component in our language acquisition- other animals normally don’t acquire language, and the difference between them and us is to a large extent innate.
- Language acquisition would be difficult or even impossible without an innate grammar: How do we come to have such rich and specific knowledge or such intricate system of belief and understanding, when the evident available to us is so meager Chomsky ( in Cook 1988)
- The mere existence of language universals supports the hypothesis that these are innate.
francis1897 answered the question on March 8, 2023 at 11:48
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