My reflection on Chomsky`s Nativist position:

After reading and discussing Chomsky's theory of First Language Acquisition I am able to say that I agree that Behaviourism is not a reasonable explanation to acquire our mother tongue since children can understand things and say things they have never heard before and that`s why Chomsky says that language is creative, “We can say anything anywhere without being controlled by precise stimuli”.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting points in his position is that he asserts that we are born with knowledge of language called Language Acquisition Device. The main argument in favor of the LAD is the argument of the poverty of the stimulus, which argues that unless children have significant innate knowledge of grammar they wouldn`t be able to learn language as quickly as they do, given that they hardly ever have access to negative evidence and rarely receive direct instructions in their first language. Chomsky also discovered that when children are learning to speak, they don't make the errors we would expect. For instance, children seem to understand that all sentences should have the structure 'subject-verb-object', even before they are able to speak in full sentences. For me this theory makes sense, “if the child`s mind cannot create language knowledge from the data in the surrounding environment, the knowledge must be within the mind itself”. All in all, the answer must not come from outside. Chomsky says that children don`t need a lot of input but just a little exposure to the language.

I really enjoyed reading this text because I found it very interesting. I think he is quite right in his concepts or at least not that wrong.

                                                                                                                            Jesica Fenara