On Oct 19 2005, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> > b. A child's 'mastery' of its native language including parts of
> > the grammar is often deficient until it is 5 or 6.
>
> This was documented by Chomsky's wife, Carol Chomsky, back in the 1950s
> (or early 1960s). In fact she went further, arguing that some parts of
> grammar don't stabalize until age 8 (IIRC). I don't think that this
> argument is damaging to Chomsky's point (nor does Noam), any more that
> the supposed refutation I heard some years ago when it was found (or at
> least argued) that children could hear their mother speaking in utero.
> What's a couple more months...
C. Chomksy (1969) was not the only researcher to investigate the attainment
of grammatical competence. Others, among them Kramer, Koff and Luria
(1972), found that some native English speakers had not acquired parts of
English grammar well into adulthood. In general, experimental
investigations into native speaker competence have provided *no* evidence
for the assumption that all adult native speakers are fully competent in
the grammar of their native language. Quite the contrary, the evidence
indicates strongly that some native speakers are more grammatically
competent than others (I can supply a long list of references if anyone is
interested).
As pointed out by G. Sampson in 'Educating Eve', N. Chomsky (1980) did, in
fact, acknowledge Kramer et al's results, which are more damaging to his
theory than those of C. Chomsky. Here is N. Chomksy's acknowledgement:
"I would be inclined to think, even without any investigation, that there
would be a correlation between linguistic performance and intelligence;
people who are intelligent use language much better than other people most
of the time. They may even know more about language; thus when we speak
about a fixed steady state, which is of course idealized, it may well be
(and there is in fact some evidence) that **the steady state attained is
rather different among people of different educational level [...] it is
entirely conceivable that some complex structures just aren’t developed by
a large number of people, perhaps because the degree of stimulation in
their external environment isn’t sufficient for them to develop.**" (1980:
175-6). [emphasis added]
In typical fashion, Chomsky retreats in the face of hard facts, redefines
his theoretical constructs to suit and tries to make it appear as though he
knew the facts along ("even without any investigation"). The 'fixed steady
state' is now allowed to vary among people of different educational level
and the steady state is now acquired in a piecemeal fashion, depending on
environmental stimulation. Apparently, it is now necesary to go to school
in order to acquire full grammatical competence. And how, generatively
speaking, can one speak of people *acquiring* complex structures? In the
generative paradigm, people are supposed to possess rules that they use in
order to *construct* structures.
The contradictions that Chomsky gets into here in trying to spin away the
facts are acute. Note that his redefinition of competence makes a complete
nonsense of a) the idea that speakers attain complete mastery of the
grammar of their native language at age 3,6, 8 or whatever and b) the
poverty of the stimulus argument.
- Ngoni Chipere
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