Noam Chomsky

Born december 7th, 1928.

American linguistic philosiphor From Philadelphia.

Mr Daley's hero.

The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted. He believes that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of socio-cultural difference.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories.

Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so accurately must already be in the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain.

Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not learn a language through imitation alone because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up and even sometimes ungrammatical. Chomsky’s theory applies to all languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be ‘hard-wired’ to acquire the grammar.

Every language is extremely complex, often with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or six years.

Having read this, I fully understand that Noam Chomsky believes in a child's ability to learn a language as well as interact in it. The idea that children are born with the ability to learn any language through their Language Acquisition Device is fascinating, as it highlights the true power of the human mind and proves that even a person of a young age can be intellectual.