Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 28 of 37) in pdf

11 DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES

towards a biological basis theory in which it was held that there are speciﬁc biological mechanisms

underlying language acquisition. Consequently there is a critical period for the learning of language.

Lenneburg (1967) argued that the lower limit for LA was the development of motor control of the

speech organs and the upper limit was puberty. the justiﬁcation for this opinion was that language

has universal properties. It has been shown that the sequences of LA are broadly similar across

world languages. All languages have certain features in common. One of them is the learning of

language at an early age.

Chomsky therefore argued that humans have an innate LA device (LAD) without which language

cannot develop. The structure of the LAD was such that it was able to perceive any regularities in

the utterances that children hear.

Such an explanation was hoped to account for the way Language developed despite the poverty of

input. that is – it could account for the way that children produce complex and unique utterances

even though they have never been exposed to complex utterances. they were, after all, the recipients

of Baby Talk register Speech.

The LAD could acquire any language, or faced with the utterances of any language could ﬁnd the

grammar for that language. An assumption of this theory was that to do so one must assume that

all languages must share some common universal constraints. These constraints limited the types

of languages that could occur.

It was thus believed that a description of the universal constraints on language was a description of

the internal structure of the LAD. The primary question thus became one of characterizing these

universal constraints on language.

Plainly the phonological aspects of language must be covered, Every language has consonants, vowels

and a syllabic structure. Such a set of characteristics must also be able to apply to syntax. All

languages have sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases and a grammatical structure that puts them

together.

Chomsky argued in 1965 that there are deep structures (d-structures) and surface structures(s-

structures) in language. To convert the deep structures to surface structures in speech we use a set

of transformational rules. The surface structure is the, almost coincidental, ordering of words in a

sentence. The surface structure can vary but is still able to reﬂect the underlying deep structure,

the meaning. Two equivalent sentences such as :

“the dog bit the man” and

“the man was bitten by the dog”

have diﬀerent surface structures but share the same deep structure. The relationship between the

d- and s- structures is achieved using the rules of transformation. These rules are there to make the

connection between meaning and sound.

The worth of the Chomskian argument lies in the assertion that the relationship between speech

sounds and meaning is not the simple one of association through conditioning. He successfully

falsiﬁed the behaviorist view of language acquisition. instead we need to distinguish the s-structure

and d-structure and ﬁnd the rules of transformation that link them. The ability to infer such

transformational rules from surface structure must lie in the LAD.

Chomsky’s arguments prompted a lot of research into LA. His own work was involved in the pro-

duction of spoken language from a d-structure using transformational rules. This is known as a

generative grammar, because the rules are used in the inverse generative role to comprehension.

Chomsky felt that the comprehension and generation processes were logical inverses of each other.

Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 28

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