Which will be my baby´s first words? If this is one of the thoughts that cross your mind and you do not have a clue of which the answer could be, you should probably talk to a mother whose child already speaks, and from there you will infer what your child´s first utterances will be. This is due to the fact that all children acquire language in much the same way, following more or less the same order. Otherwise, how is it possible that a child from Argentina and a child from China produce the same sounds at around the same age?

The nativist position states that any human child learns any human language whatever the situation; they learn it effortlessly, regardless of culture, intelligence or personality. This is why I strongly support this theory of language acquisition. I believe we come to the world with a predisposition to acquire language; otherwise it would be too hard to explain how it is that all children in the world learn to use their language in much the same way and in such a short period of time.

It is a common belief that children acquire language through imitation. I myself used to have that idea before being exposed to these theories of language acquisition. But, do children really acquire language via mere imitation? If this was the case, they could only imitate what they hear and they would never be able to discover what not to say or to create things which they have never heard before.

What is more, there is not only the poverty of the data available to the learner; there is also the complexity of language. So, if the child´s mind could not create language knowledge from the data in the surrounding environment, given plausible conditions on the type of language evidence available, the source must be within the mind itself. Therefore, the data in the stimulus are too thin to justify the knowledge that is built out of them.

 Did you ever try correcting your child when he/she made a mistake? Did it work? Most probably not, and the reason for this is that some children are corrected by their parents and some are not, yet all acquire language, so acquisition cannot crucially depend upon correction. Therefore, as Chomsky concludes, a model of language acquisition cannot rely on a particular feature of the environment unless it is available to all children.

Acquisition of language is, to Chomsky, learning in a peculiar sense, it is not acquisition of information from outside the organism, it is internal development in response to vital, but comparatively trivial, experience from outside. So, knowledge of language needs experience to mature, without it nothing would happen; but the entire potential is there from the start. The physical basis of UG means that it is part of the human genetic inheritance, a part of biology rather than of psychology. UG theory aims to explain grammatical rather than pragmatic competence: principles of UG are incapable of being learnt by social interaction.

The lingüist recognizes three possible types of evidence for acquisition. First comes positive evidence, which can set a parameter to a particular value. Then comes the direct negative evidence (corrections by the speech community) and finally there is the indirect negative evidence (the fact that certain forms do not occur in the sentences the children hear may suffice to set a parameter). Positive evidence alone is insufficient to acquire the principles of UG. The alternatives to innateness are insufficient because they rely on positive evidence, or they occur too rarely or too inconsistently.

I believe one of the weaknesses this theory might have is that Chomsky concentrates too much on the grammar aspect of language and does not go deep into the social interaction or the functions of language. However, he does not deny the importance of social context, he was only not interested in studying it As Cook and Newson state “UG theory has a unique central place in first language acquisition studies. But it is only part of the broad picture. UG theory is concerned with the acorn rather than with the tree in all its complexity; vital as the acorn may be as the source of growth and development, for many purposes the leaves, the wood, or the blossom are more important. The danger is that UG may be seen as a threat to other ideas of language development, rather than as a complementary theory that accounts for a specific area of vital concern to those interested in the unique properties of the human mind”.(P.124)[1]

All things considered, I believe the innateness hypothesis of language acquisition is very strong and reliable, since it is able to answer the main questions that any theory of language acquisition should be able to answer, namely: why is it that children follow more or less the same order when acquiring a language?; how is it that they acquire the language is such a short period of time and how the two systems (the system of sounds and the system of meanings) are acquired? So, even though Chomsky´s theory may still lack some explanations, I strongly believe that all the afore mentioned explanations of the process of language acquisition give enough credibility to this theory.

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[1] In Cook, V.J. and Newson, M. (1996) Chomsky´s Universal Grammar. An introduction -2^nd edition. Blackwell (Chapter 3)

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Here I´m leaving a link to an interesting video on this topic!!!

Imitation theory vs innateness theory of language acquisition