THE NATIVIST APPROACH

GROUP MEMBERS:
Nuradilah binti Sharifudin Fatin Azimah binti Noor Azaman Aimi Najwa binti Ghazali Ananthan A/L T. Nadarajan Mohammad Fitri bin Mohammad

The Nativist Approach

Noam Chomsky (1996) suggests that language is an innate faculty (were born with set of rules about language in our heads Universal Language) That explain the childs mastery of native language in such a short time UL contains Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Language Acquisition Device

4 innate linguistic properties

Ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds Ability to organize linguistic data Knowledge that only certain kind of linguistic system Ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system

Contributions of nativist theories:

How the system of child language works. The childs linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer incorrect stuctures, but it is a system which constantly forming hypothesis on a basis of the input receive and testing those hypothesis in speech. As the childs language develops those hypothesis are revised, reshaped or abandoned.

 Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct hypothetical grammars of child language. The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot grammars.

Cognitive and language development

Bloom pointed out that the relationship in which words occur in the utterances are only superficially similar For instance, mommy sock She founds at least 3 possible underlying relations, that is agent action ( mommy is putting the sock on ), agent object ( mommy sees the sock ), and the possessor possessed ( mommys sock )

 Thus, she concluded that children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order, which is the word mommy sock means a number of different things to a child. As the conclusion of various research, the children language study based on the relationship of the cognitive development to the first language acquisition

 Piaget described overall development as the results of the childrens interactions with their environment, with a complementary interactions between their developing perceptual cognitives capacities and their language experience.

 Dan Slobin says that in all languages, semantic learning depends on the cognitives development, and that sequence of the development are determined more by semantic complexity than by the structural.

THE END