Language Acquisition Device

 

The language acquisition device is a controversial claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. it is a component of the nativist   theory of language.

How it works:

lets go into a little more detail on the LAD. chomsky proposed that every child was born with LAD that holds the fundamental rules for language., in other words children are born with an understanding of the rules of language, they simply need to acquire the vocabulary.

Chomsky posed that language is fundamentally similar across all of humanity.for instance, every language has something like a noun, and a verb and every language has the ability to make things positive or negative.

chomsky also discovered that when children are learning to speak, they dont make the errors you would expect., children seem to understand that all sentence should have the structure ;subject-verb-object even before they are able to speak in full sentences.

from his experiments, Dr Chomsky also noted that young children, well before reaching language fluency, would notice if adults around them spoke in a grammatically incorrect manner. children attempt to apply grammatical rules to words for which their language makes an exception/. for example in following the English rules of grammar, a child might pluralize  the word fish as fishes and deer as deers, even though our language makes exceptions for those words.