Cognitive Basis of Universal Grammar
Cognitive Basis of Universal Grammar
The Universal Grammar of Language
For various reasons, the traditional concept of universal grammar lost favor with scientists throughout the last century. However, in the last twenty years, it has been revived—in what is called generativism—by Noam Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky’s version of universal grammar shares the same assumption as early versions regarding the universality of logic and the interdependence between language and thought. However, it considers the empirical study of language to be more indebted to the philosophy of mind than to traditional logic and the philosophy of language. Among the several known attempts to formulate, and in some cases solve, the so-called mind-body problem, we can mention the following: dualism, materialism, idealism, and monism.
Dualism
Dualism is particularly associated with Plato and Descartes. The dualist holds not only the existence of the mind but also that it differs from matter by its physical nature.
Materialism
Materialism asserts that there is nothing more than matter, and that the assumptions concerning mental phenomena can ultimately be explained through the purely physical properties of material bodies. According to Behaviorism, there is no such thing as a mind, and terms like ‘mind,’ ‘thought,’ ’emotion,’ ‘will,’ and ‘desire’ are to be construed as referring to certain types of behavior or predispositions to behave in a certain way.
Idealism
Idealism denies the existence of the material field and maintains that everything that exists is mental. Another term used instead of ‘idealism’ is ‘mentalism.’
Monism
Monism proclaims the unity of reality.
Mentalism, Rationalism, and Nativism
Chomsky has argued that language is proof in favor of mentalism—that is, the existence of the mind. He argues that the acquisition and use of language cannot be explained without appealing to principles that are currently beyond a physiological explanation of human beings. Chomskyan mentalism has a negative and a positive aspect, of which the latter is more controversial. The negative, or critical, aspect is anti-physicalism or anti-materialism, and more particularly, within the context of the previously dominant ideology in American linguistics and psychology, it is anti-behaviorism. Behaviorism (a version of materialism that restricts the subject matter of psychology to human behavior and attempts to explain types of conduct, e.g., speech) posits that thought is defined as inner speech, arising from psychological processes and biological determinants. But the type of behavior that Bloomfield, along with Chomsky, criticized in his review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior is bleak.
In turn, the positive proposals are the most original of Chomskyan mentalism. One of the crucial problems of the philosophy of mind refers to the acquisition of knowledge and the role that the mind, or reason, plays in this process, on the one hand, and the experience of the senses, on the other. Chomsky argued that the principles by which the mind acquires knowledge are innate.
Chomsky assumes that the language used to express thought is innate to humans, who are genetically endowed with the capacity to form certain concepts and not others. First, learning (or acquiring) the grammatical structure of one’s native language requires an explanation analogous to the process of matching the meaning of a word form. Second, he pointed out that the nature of language and the language acquisition process cannot be explained without mentioning the existence of an innate faculty for acquisition.
One way to understand structural dependence is the certainty that the child, at the beginning of first language acquisition, must grasp that speech data are not arbitrary but are regulated by structural rules—or, put another way, have structural dependence.
Language faculty (in the sense that the term ‘faculty’ is traditionally used) is one of many mental structures, each of which is highly specialized with respect to its role.
Piaget’s Stages of Development
According to Piaget, there are four stages in the development of a child’s mental processes. For language acquisition, the crucial stage, in his view, lasts until the age of two, during which the child experiences the tangible objects of their environment. This is followed by the so-called pre-operational stage, which lasts until the period known as the use of reason (about seven years), during which the child comes to handle words and phrases based on their previous understanding of how tangible objects can be compared, manipulated, and transformed.
Chomsky has argued that the evidence does not support Piaget in this, as language acquisition does not appear to be affected by differences in intellectual ability in children.
Piaget’s theory of mental development is often seen as lying between the traditional extremes of rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand, it emphasizes the importance of experience, and on the other, it takes the different stages of cognitive development as a process unique to the species and genetically programmed.