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The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. [1] The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the ...
Avram Noam Chomsky [a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", [b] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
In a protected environment where external causes of death are rare (laboratory conditions, low mortality countries, etc.), the age-independent mortality component is often negligible. In this case the formula simplifies to a Gompertz law of mortality. In 1825, Benjamin Gompertz proposed an exponential increase in death rates with age.
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
According to Chomsky, a human child's mind is equipped with a "language acquisition device" formed by inborn mental properties called "linguistic universals" which eventually constructs a mental theory of the child's mother tongue. [19] The linguist's main object of inquiry, as Chomsky sees it, is this underlying psychological reality of language.
Generative grammar began in the late 1950s with the work of Noam Chomsky, having roots in earlier approaches such as structural linguistics. The earliest version of Chomsky's model was called Transformational grammar , with subsequent iterations known as Government and binding theory and the Minimalist program .
The LAD is an abstract part of the human mind which houses the ability for humans to acquire and produce language. [29] Chomsky proposed that children are able to derive rules of a language through hypothesis testing because they are equipped with a LAD. The LAD then transforms these rules into basic grammar. [29]
In Chomsky's theories prior to MP, he had been interested exclusively in formalism, and had believed that language could be isolated from other cognitive abilities. However, with the introduction of MP, Chomsky considers aspects of cognition (e.g. the conceptual-intentional (CI) system and the sensory motor (SM) system) to be linked to language.