[Corpora-List] The Language I D

[Ngoni Chipere]

On Oct 19 2005, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> > b.    A child's 'mastery' of its native language ­ including parts of 
> > the grammar ­ is often deficient until it is 5 or 6.
> 
> This was documented by Chomsky's wife, Carol Chomsky, back in the 1950s 
> (or early 1960s). In fact she went further, arguing that some parts of 
> grammar don't stabalize until age 8 (IIRC). I don't think that this 
> argument is damaging to Chomsky's point (nor does Noam), any more that 
> the supposed refutation I heard some years ago when it was found (or at 
> least argued) that children could hear their mother speaking in utero. 
> What's a couple more months...

C. Chomksy (1969) was not the only researcher to investigate the attainment 
of grammatical competence. Others, among them Kramer, Koff and Luria 
(1972), found that some native English speakers had not acquired parts of 
English grammar well into adulthood. In general, experimental 
investigations into native speaker competence have provided *no* evidence 
for the assumption that all adult native speakers are fully competent in 
the grammar of their native language. Quite the contrary, the evidence 
indicates strongly that some native speakers are more grammatically 
competent than others (I can supply a long list of references if anyone is 
interested).

As pointed out by G. Sampson in 'Educating Eve', N. Chomsky (1980) did, in 
fact, acknowledge Kramer et al's results, which are more damaging to his 
theory than those of C. Chomsky. Here is N. Chomksy's acknowledgement:

"I would be inclined to think, even without any investigation, that there 
would be a correlation between linguistic performance and intelligence; 
people who are intelligent use language much better than other people most 
of the time. They may even know more about language; thus when we speak 
about a fixed steady state, which is of course idealized, it may well be 
(and there is in fact some evidence) that **the steady state attained is 
rather different among people of different educational level [...] it is 
entirely conceivable that some complex structures just aren’t developed by 
a large number of people, perhaps because the degree of stimulation in 
their external environment isn’t sufficient for them to develop.**" (1980: 
175-6). [emphasis added]

In typical fashion, Chomsky retreats in the face of hard facts, redefines 
his theoretical constructs to suit and tries to make it appear as though he 
knew the facts along ("even without any investigation"). The 'fixed steady 
state' is now allowed to vary among people of different educational level 
and the steady state is now acquired in a piecemeal fashion, depending on 
environmental stimulation. Apparently, it is now necesary to go to school 
in order to acquire full grammatical competence. And how, generatively 
speaking, can one speak of people *acquiring* complex structures? In the 
generative paradigm, people are supposed to possess rules that they use in 
order to *construct* structures.

The contradictions that Chomsky gets into here in trying to spin away the 
facts are acute. Note that his redefinition of competence makes a complete 
nonsense of a) the idea that speakers attain complete mastery of the 
grammar of their native language at age 3,6, 8 or whatever and b) the 
poverty of the stimulus argument.

- Ngoni Chipere