Wednesday, September 17, 2008

I had an epiphany! Now I know exactly what bothers me with the innatist perspective on language acquisition. So, children perceive the "grammaticalness" of sentences due to the in-built knowledge. But different languages have different grammar systems, and a grammatical structure of one language will be ungrammatical in another. And this is where I come to a contradiction. Either our brains have a grammar encyclopedia installed, or genes carry the information about particular language, or somtehing does not work here.

3 comments:

Esther Smidt said...

I think it's language-specific, although, you're right, it almost seems as if the environment HAS to play a part. So it can't be JUST innatist.

Bekir said...
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Bekir said...

I think our mind is able to do all of them, as we wish.