Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [352]
The man is tall.
Is the man tall?
they would derive the rule: Start at the beginning, move on to the first appearance of “is” or another verb, and shift that verb to the front. But the rule is too simple; it fails as soon as one confronts a sentence like:
The man who is tall is in the room—
where the rule would lead them to say
Is the man who tall is in the room?
But children never make that mistake. They make trivial ones like “toofs” but not substantive ones; they sense the relationships among the elements of the thought—its syntactic constituents or “phrase structures.” It is by means of this knowledge of “universal grammar” that children make sense of what they hear and effortlessly construct correct sentences they have never heard.
When and how do they come by a knowledge of universal grammar and deep structure? Chomsky’s answer perfectly expresses the revolution against the behaviorist doctrine that the newborn’s mind is a tabula rasa. Somewhere in the brain, he maintains, is a specialized neural structure—he calls it the Language Acquisition Device, or L.A.D.—that is genetically wired to recognize the ways in which the things and actions represented by noun phrases and verb phrases are related to one another as agent, action, and object.
Chomsky and the many psycholinguists who adopted his view or developed their own versions of it set out in new form the ancient question, banned during the behaviorist era, of whether knowledge exists in the mind before experience. Their answer: While language itself is learned, the brain is so constructed that children spontaneously extract the rules of speech from what they hear without being taught those rules and, making only minor errors, use them when constructing sentences.
Though usually serious and intense, Chomsky is certainly capable of wit. To illustrate the deep relationships among the components of a sentence, he concocted a completely absurd one that has become famous: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Although totally nonsensical, it feels very different to the reader from an equally nonsensical rearrangement of the words: “Ideas furiously green colorless sleep.” Anyone familiar with English finds the first version somehow comfortable—it almost seems to mean something—while the second is uncomfortable gibberish. The reason is that the first version obeys the rules of both surface grammar and deep structure; the second does not.
Chomsky’s theory touched off fierce controversy, largely because of its innatism, although he did not posit inborn ideas but only the inborn capacity to experience language in useful ways. Some critics, rejecting the hypothesis of an L.A.D., agreed that the ability to acquire language is innate but said that it is a byproduct of general intellectual abilities. Others to whom the theory of an innate L.A.D. is unacceptable keep finding grounds on which to reject it. One such ground, for instance, is that genetically transmitted organs are subject to variations. If so, some children should have abnormal L.A.D.’s and be deficient in some areas of language comprehension, but there seems to be no evidence of that.60
Aside from the controversy, for half a century psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists have been gathering evidence that shows how language relates to thought and reveals thought processes. Some patiently observe the errors and self-corrections children make in learning language, some analyze language games, some study developmental language disorders like dyslexia and acquired language disorders produced by brain injuries, and some conduct reaction-time experiments. An instance of the last: Herbert Clark and others have found that when subjects are shown a simple pattern, such as a star above a plus sign, and alongside it either a true affirmation