Білім беру бағдарламасына арналған торм 5206 тілдерді оқытудағы психологиялық МӘселелер пәні бойынша лекция тезистерінің жинағы

The theory of innate linguistic knowledge, rather "young" and popular in the last three or four decades. Supporters of this theory (239, 275, etc.), believe that child is born with certain genetically determined knowledge "of language universals: universals of semantic, syntactic, lexical, phonetic and other”. Society also plays a role of a "push" or "activator" to "launch" of innate linguistic mechanism.

It seems that the idea of an innate capacity for various kinds of symbolization (landmark designation) in this theory is productive. Probably, also productive is a thought of innate universals of language, especially since some of them (at least some semantic and syntactic "rules") associated with mental universal (thinking, emotions, etc.).

At the same time, features of different languages and different cultures, "social environment" where child acquires language, show us the uniqueness of language acquisition as a whole system of assimilation and identity of its individual components (syntactic, lexical, phonetic, etc.), by children of different nationalities. Consequently, not only congenital factors determine the ontogenesis of language and speech activities in general. Considerable role in child’s speech development belongs to social factors, in particular, the specifics of the language which child adopts.

Nativist approaches to the study of child language asked some of those deeper questions. The term nativist is derived from the fundamental asser­tion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Innateness hypotheses gained support from several sides. Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed that language is a "species-specific" behavior and that certain modes of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined. Chomsky (1965) similarly claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child's mastery of a native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language.This innate knowledge, according to Chomsky, is embodied in a "little black box" of sorts, a language acquisition device (LAD). McNeill (1966) described LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties:

1) the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment,

2) the ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined,

3) knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not, and

4) the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing lin­guistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

McNeill and other Chomskyan disciples composed eloquent argu­ments for the appropriateness of the LAD proposition, especially in con­trast to behavioristic, stimulus-response (S-R) theory, which was so limited in accounting for the generativity of child language. Aspects of meaning, abstractness, and creativity were accounted for more adequately. Even though it was readily recognized that the LAD was not literally a cluster of brain cells that could be isolated and neurologically located, such inquiry on the rationalistic side of the linguistic-psychological continuum stimu­lated a great deal of fruitful research.

More recently, researchers in the nativist tradition have continued this line of inquiry through a genre of child language acquisition research that focuses on what has come to be known as Universal Grammar. Positing that all human beings are genetically equipped with abilities that enable them to acquire language, researchers expanded the LAD notion into a system of universal linguistic rules that went well beyond what was origi­nally proposed for the LAD. Universal Grammar (UG) research is attempting to discover what it is that all children, regardless of their environmental stimuli (the language [s] they hear around them) bring to the language acquisition process. Such studies have looked at question formation, nega­tion, word order, discontinuity of embedded clauses, subject deletion, and other grammatical phenomena.

One of the more practical contributions of nativist theories is evident if you look at the kinds of discoveries that have been made about how the system of child language works. Research has shown that the child's language, at any given point, is a legitimate system in its own right. The child's linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer "incorrect" structures, not a language in which earlier stages have more "mistakes" than later stages. Rather, the child's language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis of the input received and then testing those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension). As the child's language develops, those hypotheses are continually revised, reshaped, or sometimes abandoned.

Before generative linguistics came into vogue, Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children learn language not as a series of separate dis­crete items, but as an integrated system. Using a simple nonsense-word test, Berko discovered that English-speaking children as young as four years of age applied rules for the formation of plural, present progressive, past tense, third singular, and possessives. She found, for example, that if a child saw one "wug" he could easily talk about two "wugs," or if he were pre­sented with a person who knows how to "gling," the child could talk about a person who "glinged" yesterday, or sometimes who "glang."

Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct hypothetical grammars (that is, descriptions of linguistic systems) of child language, although such grammars were still solidly based on empirical data. These grammars were largely formal representations of the deep structure—the abstract rules underlying surface output, the structure not overtly manifest in speech. Linguists began to examine child language from early one- and two-word forms of "telegraphese" to the complex language of five- to ten-year-olds. Borrowing one tenet of structural and behavioristic paradigms, they approached the data with few preconceived notions about what the child's language ought to be, and probed the data for internally consistent systems, in much the same way that a linguist describes a language in the "field." The use of a generative framework was, of course, a departure from structural methodology.

The generative model has enabled researchers to take some giant steps toward understanding the process of first language acquisition. The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot grammars. It was commonly observed that the child's first two-word utterances seemed to manifest two separate word classes, and not simply two words thrown together at random. Consider the following utterances:

My cap All gone milk

That horsie Mommy sock

Linguists noted that the words on the left-hand side seemed to belong to a class that words on the right-hand side generally did not belong to.That is, my could co-occur with cap, horsie, milk, or sock, but not with that or all gone. Mommy is, in this case, a word that belongs in both classes. The first class of words was called "pivot," since they could pivot around a number of words in the second, "open" class. Thus the first rule of the generative grammar of the child was described as follows:

Sentence -> Pivot word + Open word

Research data gathered in the generative framework yielded a multitude of such rules. Some of these rules appear to be grounded in the UG of the child. As the child's language matures and finally becomes adult-like, the number and complexity of generative rules accounting for language com­petence of course boggles the mind.

In subsequent years the generative "rule-governed" model in the Chomskyan tradition has been challenged. The assumption underlying this tradition is that those generative rules, or "items" in a linguistic sense, are connected serially, with one connection between each pair of neurons in the brain. A new "messier but more fruitful picture" (Spolsky 1989: 149) was provided by what has come to be known as the parallel distributed processing (PDP) model (also called connectionism) in which neurons in the brain are said to form multiple connections: each of the 100 billion nerve cells in the brain may be linked to as many as 10,000 of its counter­parts. Thus, a child's (or adult's) linguistic performance may be the conse­quence of many levels of simultaneous neural interconnections rather than a serial process of one rule being applied, then another, then another, and so forth.

A simple analogy to music illustrates this complex notion. Think of an orchestra playing a symphony. The score for the symphony may have, let's say, twelve separate parts that are performed simultaneously. The "sym­phony" of the human brain enables us to process many segments and levels of language, cognition, affect, and perception all at once—in a parallel con­figuration. And so, according to the PDP model, a sentence—which has phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, discourse, soci-olinguistic, and strategic properties—is not "generated" by a series of rules (Ney & Pearson 1990; Sokolik 1990). Rather, sentences are the result of the simultaneous interconnection of a multitude of brain cells.

All of these approaches within the nativist framework have made at least three important contributions to our understanding of the first language acquisition process:

1) freedom from the restrictions of the so-called "scientific method" to explore the unseen, unobservable, underlying, abstract lin­guistic structures being developed in the child;

2) systematic description of the child's linguistic repertoire as either rule-governed or operating out of parallel distributed processing capacities; and

3) the construction of a number of potential properties of Universal Grammar.