The mentalist or innatist view of language learning evolved as an alternative to the behaviourists’ inadequate language learning explanation. Chomsky was the key personality behind this mentalist theory. It is known as mentalist theory because it sees/views language not as conditioned, stimulus-bound verbal behaviour but as a property of the mind.
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| Mentalist or Innatist Theory |
According to this theory,
Everybody learns a language, not because they are subjected to a similar conditioning process, but because they possess an inborn capacity.
This capacity is by definition universal. Noam Chomsky attacks with particular vehemence the notion that language responses are under the control of external stimuli.
For him:
The most important thing of all is that human beings use language whereas other animals do not. Since all normal human beings learn their language successfully they must possess some internal capacity for language that other animals do not have.
Chomsky describes this ‘internal faculty’ as a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) that contains a knowledge of linguistic universals.
Language Acquisition Device
LAD is said to operate in the following way. A child, from birth, is exposed to language which acts as a trigger for the learning device. The device has the capacity to formulate hypotheses about the structure of the language to which it is exposed. The child is, of course, quite unconscious of this process.
The child tries out these hypotheses in his own language production. Then he checks them out against the further data that his exposure to the language provides. As he finds that his hypotheses cannot account for all the data, he modifies the hypotheses and checks them again. In this way he brings his speech closer and closer to the adult model to which he is for the most part exposed.
What the child is doing is constructing an internal grammar of the language. This grammar passes through successive modifications until it becomes the complete grammar of the adult language which is identical with the descriptive grammar that the linguist attempts to write.
Chomsky argues his innateness hypothesis on basically three counts: firstly, the existence of language universals. It 1s argued that the similarity in languages cannot possibly be due to anything other than a specific cognitive capacity in man.
Secondly, the adult speech which a child hears around him is so poorly structured and impaired in performance that he could not possibly learn language unless he brought to the task a very specific capacity. The third and last count on which the innateness hypothesis is argued concerns the speed of acquisition of language.
Language could not be learnt with such speed unless the child were pre-programmed to do so (Cruttenden, 1979).
Mentalist theory attaches little or no importance to the role of social factors. For Chomsky they have virtually no role at all. If children learnt only from the environment, they would not have been able to construct new sentences which they have not heard before.
Sometimes children are seen to produce words in completely new contexts. All these facts establish the existence of an innate faculty which the mentalists call ‘language acquisition device’.
There is another way in which the behaviourists and mentalists may differ. Whereas the behaviourists will talk of the child using ‘analogy’ in the construction of sentences, the mentalists prefer to think in terms of the production and application of ‘rules’. Chomsky says that the behaviourists break their own principles in admitting that there is an analogy forming mechanism in children.
Criticism of Mentalist or Innatist Theory
There are a number of problems or weaknesses of this theory. All these things are from the review of experts and critics. Let’s see what are the points of criticism in the mentalist or innatist theory.
Difficulty of Thinking LAD
In spite of the richness and subtlety of Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition, it also shows the difficulty of thinking LAD purely in abstract terms. In order to discover the manner in which LAD might operate. We would need to look at concrete instances of language and try to explain them in terms of Chomsky’s theory.
No Proper Explanation of LAD
One function attributed to the LAD is that it gives the child prior knowledge about the categories according to which experience is organized by language. But must this knowledge be innate? Could the child not learn the basic categories of which language makes use from his experience of the world during infancy?
Role of Situation
A further problematic feature of Chomsky’s theory is his view of the role of situation in the language learning process. Chomsky’s view is that exposure to Language in a situation is a mere precondition for the activation of LAD. But it is very difficult to see how the child can come to identify the means without considerable experience of knowledge in situations.
Structural View of Language
Structurally, all languages have striking similarities and all children exhibit identical steps in learning them.
Conclusion
All over the world children have been seen to show similar stages in their language acquisition process: crying, cooing, babbling, 1-word stage, 2-word stage. These stages do not differ much irrespective of race, country, or language. The assumption that the child’s linguistic development is predetermined from birth to follow certain patterns would provide an attractive account of the clearly parallel linguistic development shown by all normal children. LAD 1s the innate mechanism which possesses the capacity to formulate hypotheses about the structure of the Language to which it is exposed.
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