Sunday, November 13, 2011

Reflection about Chomsky’s Theory

Noam Chomsky is a one of the fathers of modern linguistics, as well as one of the world’s most renowned theorists of the 21st Century. Besides the theoretical field, he published in other research fields, including the Applied Science and Applied Linguistics arena with a focus on Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Development, and Language Acquisition. These theories and publishes are all new for me since I am not a linguistics major. All I know about Noam Chomsky is from my child development textbook. I still remember from my child development textbook, the author stated that Chomsky’s theory belong to the Nativism Theory. Children are born with language capacities to access and development language. Initially, this is all I knew about Chomsky. When I started to read his theory one year ago, I was so frustrated and did not know how fully grasp and understand his theory. I chose to read his biography first. I highly recommend the book from our TWU library that looks at the life of Noam Chomsky. This book is in electronic format, so a student can access the book from home. The book is entitled, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. If you are like me without any background related to Chomsky’s theory, you can begin to explore this book and our blog. The purpose of this blog is to share some useful websites and information for others to have a better understanding of Chomsky’s theory. We also welcome others to post any comments and reflections on this blog.

Barsky, Robert F. (1998). Noam Chomsky a life of dissent. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for your suggestions. The biography appears to be very useful. Your feature chart was also a very clear and succinct, making it another very valuable resource which I will use to guide my future studies about Chomsky.
    -Tahani

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  2. For Chomsky the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes that the child learn during this development.

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  3. I can understand why child development books placed Chomsky under Nativism theory, however I am not sure that it where he would have included himself. Yet, the innateness of his LAD lends itself not only to Nativism but to the biological side of the nature versus nurture debate,

    -Joanne

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  4. Thank you for the electronic book suggestion to get a better understanding about Chomsky. I often find that if I can understand the process that a theorist went through to develop their theory, I can often understand the theory better, even if I don't agree completely with it. Many times we learn about these theories in isolation, without the benefit of context, and they don't make sense when they are simply "tenets" of a particular theory. I would love to read about Chomsky's research and the process that led him to posit that babies are born with a LAD.

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