Nativism

Nativist approaches to language acquisition maintain that humans are born with complex, innate linguistic knowledge, often referred to as a language acquisition device containing universal grammar (UG), which constrains and facilitates the process of language learning, depending on appropriate language input. Generally concomitant with this approach are assumptions that linguistic knowledge is domain specific and therefore not derivable from general cognitive knowledge and, furthermore, that language acquisition is subject to a critical period and is compromised in cases of degraded or delayed input. Current acquisition research within the nativist tradition stems from Noam Chomsky’s landmark criticism of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist proposal, which characterized language learning as a process of stimulus and response. Chomsky argued that behaviorist approaches fail to account for the fact that children understand and produce sentences they have never heard before, as well as the observation that adults typically respond to grammatically incorrect utterances produced by young children without providing negative feedback. Chomsky proposed that these facts are more consistent with the view that children learn language by actively constructing and testing grammatical rules, based on analysis of patterns in the input and guided by UG. These rules generate all and only grammatical utterances in the target language, a central tenet of generative linguistics; nativist approaches to language acquisition are thus largely synonymous with generative approaches.

Sign language research has played an important role in testing nativist predictions. For instance, if universal grammar is truly universal, [Page 710]it should be available regardless of language modality. Accordingly, a major area of sign language research investigates the degree to which the underlying principles observed for spoken languages apply to sign languages, and vice versa. Sign language research also informs the development of linguistic theories to account for language acquisition, organization, and interaction in either modality. Finally, if UG is subject to a critical period, as are other innate systems such as vision, then delayed exposure to usable language input should result in atypical developmental patterns. Deaf children with normal intelligence who are raised in nonsigning environments have long been studied as test cases for this proposal, because their access to usable linguistic input is degraded, absent, and/or severely delayed.