Page 44 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
picked up, he will achieve the desired outcome. The achievement of the goal – being picked up – reinforces in his mind what the word “up” means, and he will be more likely to use it again in the future in the same scenario.
facilitate language acquisition, and investigation into which aspects of language may be consistent across different languages. If similarities in the structure of all languages known to exist in the world could be proven, this would further support the idea that all humans are endowed with universal grammar.
The idea of universal grammar was further popu- larised through the work of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who offered an evolutionary perspective on Chomsky’s theory in his 1994 book The Language Instinct. Chomsky had described universal grammar as something innate, a part of our very DNA, and the special feature that elevates humans above other animals. But, unwilling to accept that language is simply part of us, Pinker sought to provide a biological explanation for why humans had acquired this skill, arguing that universal grammar is the result of evolution and natural selection. He agreed that language is a uniquely human ability, but posited that it has developed as a specialised adaptation that ensures that we can survive and thrive in our environment – much like a spider’s natural instinct to create a web. He described universal grammar as being representative of the structures in the brain that recognise the language rules and patterns in another person’s speech. This natural affinity speeds up the process of language acquisition in children when they are exposed to language in their external environment and is disassembled to some degree as the child grows up – having mastered language, the brain frees up capacity for other functions, no longer prioritising the learning of language. This is a phenomenon that would be well understood by anyone who has tried to learn a language as an adult.
However, it is important to note that the theory of universal grammar has not gone uncontested. Linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett, for example, claimed to have found a language that does not display the key evidence for universal grammar – namely, recursion, which enables a limited number of words to be combined in an infinite number of ways – in the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon. He maintained that this was sufficient evidence
Chomsky’s argument led to
a wave of linguistic research
into the biological mechanisms that might facilitate language
acquisition ...
Many people agreed with Skinner’s theory or developed their own similar theories, which supported the idea that language was not innate in humans, but learned through our engagement with other people and our environment. American linguist Noam Chomsky, however, took a strongly opposing view, arguing that the human ability to acquire and use language is a biological feature, hard-wired in the neural networks of the brain. This is not to say that children are born with the ability to fluently speak their mother tongue, but rather that children are bestowed with a natural syntactic knowledge, a fundamental ability to understand and apply the rules of language – regardless of whether they will learn to speak English, Spanish, French or any other language from their parents. Chomsky argued that humans are naturally programmed with a universal grammar, and that we need only learn the parochial features of any particular language in order to speak it.
Chomsky’s theory gained credibility as it accounted for the fact that children do not have to be explicitly taught every specific word and sentence that could possibly exist in order to use them. Rather, children are exposed to a limited vocabulary in their early years and learn very quickly to apply the rules of their language to construct an infinite number of sentences. Chomsky highlighted that, often, children will actually utter things that are highly unlikely to have been heard by them from any adult, such as the erroneous application of the “ed” suffix to irregular past tense verbs, such as “runned”. The overgeneralisation of the “ed” for past tense verbs shows that the child is clearly attempting to apply a rule, rather than simply imitating something they have heard – pointing to an internal aptitude for language.
Chomsky’s argument led to a wave of linguistic research into the biological mechanisms that might
...having mastered language, the brain frees up capacity for other
functions, no longer prioritising the learning of language.
42