Here.
Check it out. Chomsky basically says that humans must be born with some sort of language learning mechanism (he calls it universal grammar). Humans simply learn language much too fast for any of the environmental explanations to make any sense. Further, the language learning mechanism fades with age, which implies an inborn trait.
Environmental opponents of this idea have come up with all sorts of loony theories on why children learn language better than adults. None of these theories make the slightest bit of sense. I was deluged with this nonsense all through graduate school while I was getting my MA.
Kids learn language whether it is spoken to them directly or not. They learn it whether people baby talk to them or not. They learn it no matter what their IQ’s are or whether or not they are retarded (savants get perfect language skills, and most of the retarded have good language). IQ has no effect on language learning. Some high IQ folks are poor language learners and some folks who are not that smart pick up multiple languages. They learn it no matter what their anxiety levels are (One of the theories I was taught was that kids have lower anxiety levels than adults, and hence they get language.)
They learn it even in societies where kids are thought to be stupid so no one even speaks language to them (all they is overhear adult talk – see first sentence above). A critical period for learning language has now been discovered, and it begins to close around age 8. It is pretty seriously closed by 14-18 or so, and it stays about that open for the rest of your life, assuming it does not decline even further, which is possible.
I used to tutor Hmongs in adult school. There were few older adult Hmongs in adult school because the Hmongs have a belief that after age 40, it’s impossible to learn a foreign language, so why even bother to try. Those Hmongs have figured out something obvious that my brilliant professors were ideology-bound to get.
All through grad school, all the professors except for a few had a strong opposition to the critical period and all such theories. Obviously, this was motivated by less than intellectual concerns. If it’s true that kids really can learn language better than adults, then that means that a lot of their crazy foreign language learning theories (often based on reducing anxiety in learner and whatnot, see above) are a bunch of hooey. Sure, there are better and worse ways of learning language, but you will always run up against the wall of biology. They are also probably afraid that if it gets out that kids learn language better than older folks, fewer people will take language classes.
My mother pointed all of this out to me as her way or showing me what a bunch of morons my genius IQ professors.
“You take anyone off the street and ask them if kids learn language better than adults, and they will tell you yes,” she said. “And if you ask them how, they will give you some answer that implies it is biological. Everyone in the world except your idiot PhD professors. So any idiot on the street knows the truth that the brilliant professors can’t figure out.”
As with some many things, she is right.
Check out Chomsky’s piece. It is very interesting on the subject of human language learning.
