Lecture 1/Week 1 - Modularity

Lecture 1/Week 1 - Modularity

1. History

   • BF Skinner/Behaviourialism
     • Science must follow a scientific method/have a hypothesis.
       • Thus Cog psychology is a non-starter because it can't be science
     • Reduced the mind to a BLACK BOX
       • The brain receives input from the senses and produces output from the body
   • NOAM CHOMSKY/UG
     • Noam claimed that behaviourism couldn't explain language
       • Came up with his own UG theory
         • Human language is unique
           • Language aquisition has a critical period
           • Children grow creole languages
           • Linguistic universals
           • POV - Poverty of the stimulus - POS is the thought of linguistics that children are not exposed to the entirety of their own language from a young age and thus are not exposed to the richness of it. This idea proposes contradictory evidence regarding empirical ideas of language only being acquired though experience.
             • What Poverty of the Stimulus does is take the rationale of behaviourism and apply it to language.
               • He says that humans are capable of generating an infinite number of unique and completely novel statements. In order for behaviourism to explain this unlimited behaviour, they would need a stimulus that was similarly unlimited in its input. Chomsky says that is ridiculous and that by the time a child is 3 years old they’re already in this endearing or obnoxious state of talking all the time nonstop and are producing novel utterances but over those years they’ve had a very finite input The stimulus needs to be able to explain the response (according to behaviourist principles). And if Chomsky can demonstrate that the human behaviour with linguistic utterances is unlimited then the input is not enough to explain that. The stimulus is impoverished relative to the response. Behaviourism can’t explain this.
     • Chomsky is wrong,
     • Chomsky says that only humans can learn grammar, and he stated this claim without evidence.
     • Humans must have a unique cognitive tool for acquiring language - UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
       • Chomsky – UG – knowledge about linguistic organisation that people are innately born with that helps us to learn and express things through language.

2. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR - CHOMSKY

   • Languages differ in Surface Structure but share a DEEP structure (nouns and their verbs are usually close together).
     • VSO/SVO - Dutch/English
     • Common thread us universal grammar