Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych
Exam Review. In this video I want to
briefly introduce the idea of universal
grammar. Universal grammar is a theory
proposed by Noam Chomsky that suggests
that all human languages share certain
features. Now people often misinterpret
this as meaning that all languages share
grammar and that they share the same
grammatical rules. Of course this is not
the case. This is not what universal
grammar refers to. So in order to
understand this idea of universal
grammar we're going to start with the
idea that all children acquire language,
right? So all children will acquire the
language that they're exposed to and it
doesn't matter what that specific
language is. Children will learn it and
they'll learn it essentially naturally.
It will emerge automatically and the
rules of grammar will also emerge
naturally. Children will come to
understand how to express things in that
language and they'll learn the rules of
grammar in that specific language.
So this is support for this idea of the
language acquisition device and this is
this idea from Chomsky that we must have
some predisposition for learning
language that other animals don't have.
If language naturally emerges in
pretty much all people who are exposed
to language then this means that our
brains are prepared to learn language. We
have a natural sort of predisposition
for acquiring language. So the idea of a
language acquisition device suggests
that we are prepared to acquire language
and again, this is not a specific
structure in the brain or something,
we talk about this language acquisition
device as a sort of a general idea of
well our brains are prepared in some way
to acquire language. It's not about a
specific region of the brain
that's doing. This okay so well, now we
have this problem. We say we
all acquire language if we're exposed to
it and we have some preparation, some
predisposition, to acquire language, well
how can we be prepared to acquire
language if languages are all different?
In other words, if I take an infant and I
raise that infant in Japan then, you know,
he'll grow up speaking Japanese, if I raise him
in Russia, he'll grow up
speaking Russian or if I raise him in
Germany, he'll grow up speaking German and
it's like, how can he be prepared? How can
we say that he has a biological
predisposition to acquiring language and
yet he doesn't know what that language
is going to be? How does this work?
Well, the idea would be there must be
some underlying features of language
that are all the same and that we're
prepared to acquire any language because
all languages have certain things in
common. So the idea here is that we're
prepared to acquire certain types of
grammatical rules but not the
specific grammatical rules. In other
words, languages must share certain
features, certain types of rules are
common to all languages and our brains
are prepared to acquire those types of
rules but the specific rules will
vary. In other words the idea that
in a specific language maybe we
learn that the adjective comes before
the noun and in some other language it
could be completely the opposite, right?
The noun could come before the adjective
and so the specific rules vary but the
idea of adjectives is the same, the idea
that we use some words to describe
some other words, that we can change some
mental representation of something by
adding an adjective to it or that we can
use verbs to express things or we
have different tenses to talk about the
time period in which things occurred,
these are things that all languages are
going to have and these are the things
that our brains are predisposed to
picking up on. The specific ways that
we express it, of course, are going to
vary and we're not born with some
pre-programmed rules about grammar but
rather that we're sort of programmed to
acquire any specific grammatical rules
because all those rules will follow
similar patterns, similar types of rules,
in the existence of things like
adjectives or adverbs or nouns. So that's
really the idea of universal grammar.
It's often misinterpreted but hopefully
this made it a little bit clearer. I
hope you found this helpful, if so, please
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