The Role of Innate Knowledge in First and Second Language Acquisition - by Hasanbey Ellidokuzoglu - Education - http://maxpages.com/thena/Innate_Knowledge_in_L1_and

I. INTRODUCTION

That some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles toward their destination by calibrating the positions of stars against time of day and year, poses no serious problem for many scientists, who can easily attribute this amazing success to the birds' instinctive behavior (Pinker, 1994, p.19). It is apparent, after all, that these animals cannot learn such complicated astronomical facts through a trial and error fashion; they neither have enough time nor necessary cognitive capacity.

The same scientists, however, including some professional linguists, are quite reluctant to attribute any form of instinct to human infant, who arrives at complex linguistic knowledge within a remarkably short period of time (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992, p.1). The infant's is no less a complicated task than that of the bird's as the linguists themselves have spent decades (or even centuries) to discover the intricacies of the very same system and with no final theory. Infants, on the other hand, not only arrives at an almost complete knowledge of grammar in their brinds (brain+mind) but also accomplish this task within less than a decade.

Although a human infant and a migratory bird are essentially alike in terms of the complexity of the task to be accomplished and their inability to handle the task with their current cognitive capacity, only the latter is believed to rely on its instincts.

There are, of course, some differences between an animal and a human baby; it would be unwise to equate the cognitive capacities of the two. And it is also impossible to underscore the importance of environmental factors in child language acquisition. After all, thousands of hours of exposure is required in order for a child to acquire his mother tongue, whereas animals like sonar-using bats or web-building spiders seem to be ready to use their instinctive knowledge with minimum, if any, learning experience. It is equally unwise, however, to suggest that a cognitively immature child can accomplish a task which has yet to be accomplished by professional linguists.

[A] child may well not have grasped the property of conservation of volume nor be able to perform but the most rudimentary arithmetic calculations, yet will have the knowledge linguists formulate as the binding principles, none of which has been explicitly taught. (Carston, 1988, p. 41)

The amazing success of children in picking up their mother tongue is no recent discovery. Slobin (1979) quotes Rene Descartes commenting on human beings' disctinctive ability to formulate a linguistic system:

...[E]ven those man born deaf and dumb, lacking the organs which others make use of in speaking, and at least as badly off as the animals in this respect, usually invent for themselves some signs by which they make themselves understood by those who are with them enough to learn their language (p. 113)

In the literature of child language acquisition there are cases in which infants, deprived of linguistic input, invent a rudimentary grammar not attributable only to the external factors. Children are also known to build a natural language when exposed to unsystematic pidgin data (Bickerton, 1981, 1983). The resulting creole is almost as systematic and sophisticated as any natural human language and more interestingly contain rules that are not attributable to the languages forming the pidgin, out of which the creole is driven.

Please, Click On The Parts Below To Read More:

2. Plato's Problem And Chomsky's Solution

3. Innate Knowledge: Domain Specific or General

4. Parallelism between Piaget and Skinner

5. Nativism and Occam's Razor

6. Wanna Contraction

7. Universal Grammar

8. Wanna and Turkish Learners of English

9. Conclusion

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