Chomsky Argument That Language is Innate

There is one skill that every child learns which most adults find difficult to master: their mother tongue. The rapidity with which a child acquires such a complex skill as language has been the subject of extensive research. While most learning is driven by rewards—we learn to achieve something—Noam Chomsky's argument, known as the Poverty of Stimulus, suggests a different mechanism is at work for language acquisition.

This concept posits that the linguistic input (stimulus) children receive is insufficient to solely account for their eventual mastery of complex language structures. Noam Chomsky, born in 1928 and often regarded as the father of modern linguistics, introduced this theory to counter the behaviorist view that language learning is merely a result of imitation and reinforcement. Chomsky argued that the richness and complexity of language that children are able to use is not a direct reflection of the language they hear around them.

The apparent discrepancy suggests that humans have an innate ability or a built-in framework for learning language, referred to as Universal Grammar. For example, a child may hear simple sentences but can later construct and understand much more complicated ones. This jump from basic input to advanced output indicates that an internal mechanism within the child is bridging the gap. Chomsky likened language acquisition to the blooming of a flower: children's brains are pre-wired with the linguistic equivalent of a botanical blueprint that steers their language development.

Although Chomsky's hypothesis has not been fully proven, it offers a compelling alternative perspective on how we learn something as intricate as language. It underscores the complexity of the human brain and highlights that we are still in the early stages of comprehensively understanding how it functions.

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