AP PSYCHOLOGY

COGNITION

THINKING AND LANGUAGE

Question [CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
Noam Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition holds that people have an inborn universal grammar that makes learning of language easy for children. Which of the following statements is used as support for this theory?
A
Children repeat words that they hear frequently.
B
Regardless of the language learned, children tend to make similar errors of grammar when they first begin to learn language.
C
Chimpanzees and other apes can easily learn language.
D
None of the above
Explanation: 

Detailed explanation-1: -Chomsky proposed that every child was born with an LAD that holds the fundamental rules for language. In other words, children are born with an understanding of the rules of language; they simply need to acquire the vocabulary.

Detailed explanation-2: -Chomsky concluded that children must have an inborn faculty for language acquisition. According to this theory, the process is biologically determined-the human species has evolved a brain whose neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth.

Detailed explanation-3: -He believed that humans are born with an innate ability to learn languages. According to Chomsky’s theory, the basic structures of language are already encoded in the human brain at birth. This “universal grammar theory” suggests that every language has some of the same laws.

Detailed explanation-4: -Chomsky based his theory on the idea that all languages contain similar structures and rules (a universal grammar), and the fact that children everywhere acquire language the same way, and without much effort, seems to indicate that we’re born wired with the basics already present in our brains.

There is 1 question to complete.