The cognitive revolution
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Outline
vð
Chomsky s review of Skinner
vð
The winds of change:
vð
Empiricism vs. nativism
vð
Structuralism vs. generative grammar
vð
Basic terms: competence and performance
vð
Chomsky s view of language acquisition
vð
LAD
vð
Hypothesis formation and testing
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Chomsky vs. Skinner
B. F. SKINNER NOAM CHOMSKY
(1904-1990) (b. 1928)
" The study of input-output relations neglects the organism s
causative role. By neglecting what is going on in the speaker s
mind, it is merely descriptive, not explanatory.
" Language is not a habit structure. A stimulus might generate an
infinite number of unpredictable responses. For example, in
reaction to a painting we might say: Beautiful, Hideous, Hanging
too low, Remember our camping trip last summer? etc.
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" Language is creative. We are able to produce and understand
sentences that we have never heard before, i.e. we haven t
been conditioned to produce or understand them, we couldn t
have learned them by association:
e.g. My guineapig died with his legs crossed.
" Certain behaviours are genetically determined and mature
without learning. Learning the rules of grammar may be one
such behaviour, since all children follow the same
developmental path in L1 acquisition, irrespectively of the
language being learned.
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However...
" The notion of language as habit was Bloomfieldian. It was
considered incorrect, or imprecise, by psychologists who saw
learning as establishing a set of connections (or associations).
" The major contribution of behaviorism was introduction of rigid
empirical research paradigms in psychology, which provided
basis for contemporary psycholinguistics.
" Behaviourist notions of associative learning provided
foundations for today s connectionism.
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The cognitive revolution
" Chomsky s criticism of behaviorism, and his later
work, started a new way of thinking sometimes
referred to as cognitivism.
" Apart from linguistics, the cognitive revolution
transformed cognitive and developmental
psychology, philosophy, parts of anthropology,
neuroscience, artificial intelligence (Bechtel and
Abrahamsen 2002).
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Empiricism vs. nativism (rationalism)
" The nature nurture controversy:
Does behaviour and development derive from heredity and
genes (nativism) or are they the effect of experience and
learning (empiricism)?
" Nativism:
 Plato: humans are born with innate ideas
 Christianity: humans are born with original sin
 Rene Descartes
" Empiricism:
 Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, David Hartley
 John Locke (1691): the human mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate)
at birth
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Chomsky s revolution in linguistics
" transformational-generative grammar, which generates surface structures from
deep structures through a series of transformations
(Cook 2007: 122)
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Structuralism Generative Grammar
Subject matter Corpus of Speaker s knowledge of how
utterances to produce and understand
sentences, his linguistic
competence
Goal Classification of Specification of the grammatical rules
the elements of underlying the construction of
the corpus sentences
Methods Discovery Evaluation procedures
procedures
(Searle 1972)
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Fundamental constructs in Chomsky s
(1965) early work
" competence - the underlying, implicit knowledge of language; internalized
system of rules;
 linguistic competence is an idealized knowledge of a native speaker
who has mastered the language perfectly;
 it is free from any regional or foreign influences;
 competence is the object of study for a linguist;
" hence, the subject matter of linguistics is the contents of the
human mind, not the actual linguistic behaviour,
" in the case of an educated adult native speaker the
competence can be studied by introspection - no field data
is necessary.
" performance - the actual linguistic production
 the actual performance is affected by variables such as memory
limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, errors, and
hesitation phenomena such as repeats, false starts, pauses, omissions
and additions,
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 therefore, it is of no interest to a linguist.
Chomskian view of language acquisition
" Basic premises:
 language acquisition is qualitatively different from other cognitive processes,
since grammar is too complex to learn for an infant s immature cognitive
system;
 languages are not learned through imitation of the adult model, since adults
linguistic performance is too imperfect to serve as a reliable model to
develop linguistic competence;
 reinforcement is unnecessary for successful L1 acquisition, since adults do
not correct the erroneous forms:
Child: Nobody don t like me.
Mother: No, say  nobody likes me.
Child: Nobody don t like me.
(Eight repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say  nobody likes me.
Child: Oh! Nobody don t likes me.
(from McNeill 1966: 69; no age given)
" Hence, there must be a separate language faculty in the brain, different
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from other cognitive faculties.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
primary linguistic data LAD
generative grammar
" LAD is an innate, uniquely human language capacity.
" LAD operates independently of general cognitive processes.
 Even people with low IQs acquire language.
" Input is necessary to trigger the operation of LAD. However, the
course of language acquisition is determined solely by the
properties of LAD.
" LAD atrophies around puberty (okres dojrzewania).
 The Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg 1967)
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Language learning is a process of
hypotheses formation and testing
" A language acquiring child acts like a scientist testing
out a theory.
"  To acquire language, a child must devise a
hypothesis compatible with presented data - he must
select from the store of potential grammars a specific
one that is appropriate to the data available to him
(Chomsky 1965: 36)
"  Each successive hypothesis is an interim
(przejściowa) grammar accounting more successfully
for the data he is exposed to. The last hypothesis is
the final adult grammar of competence in the
language (Cook 1969: 208)
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Criticism of the LAD construct
 The LAD proposition certainly addresses many of the
particularly thorny aspects of language acquisition. [...]
However, they are accounted for very inexplicitly. They are
accounted for in much the same way that the
philosophical proposition of the existence of a god
accounts for the creation of human life: we do not know
how humankind was created, therefore an entity is
proposed as creator of life. Similarly we could argue that
LAD is an unobserved invention that only superficially
accounts for language acquisition, since we know as little
about our philosophical god as we do about LAD
(H. D. Brown 1987: 20)
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Chomsky s influence on L1 acquisition
research
" A child should be treated as a speaker of a language of his/her own
rather than a defective (niedorowinięty) speaker of adult language, who
has insufficiently mastered the rules. The child s language at any stage
is a system in its own right.
" The system is developing as the child is constantly forming hypotheses
on the basis of the received input and then testing them.
" This means that a child s utterances, e.g.
 Him go shop.
 Aaron go home.
 Seth play toy.
are a product of the child s grammar, i.e. a unique set of internalized
rules.
" This led to writing grammars of child language (e.g. Braine 1963, Klima
and Bellugi 1966, R. Brown 1973).
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Mean order of acquisition of grammatical
morphemes (R. Brown 1973)
1. Present progressive (-ing)
2/3. in, on
4. Plural (-s)
5. Past irregular
6. Possessive (- s)
7. Uncontractible copula (is, am, are)
8. Articles (a, the)
9. Past regular (-ed)
10. Third person regular (-s)
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