Language Acquisition: A Comparative Analysis

1. INTRODUCTION

The debate of how language can be acquired has been ongoing for decades now. There have been arguments on how language and cognition is by nature, that is, it is natural and not learned, it is something genetic and innate and certainly not man-made. However some argue that language is acquired through nurture; it is learnt according to the environmental influences and by the society in which one lives in. In this essay I’ll state the approaches to studying language of both Burrhus Frederic Skinner and Aram Noam Chomsky, discuss their differences and similarities, and how Edmund Husserl would respond to them then proceed to compare their positions to that of Husserl.

2. BURRHUS FREDERIC SKINNER

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a behaviorist,

Furthermore he states there is optimal age limit and stage of development of language and that there is no need to trigger it, one gets it regardless of culture or environment and that there was absolutely no need to learn any rules as there is no universal grammar. He says language do not have to be corrected and he says universal grammar is poverty of stimulus as you can write a sentence grammatically correct yet it might fail to make sense, for example (Ambridge & Lieven 2011) quoted Chomsky 1959 Universal Grammar example “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, all the rules of grammar are correct but it makes no sense. Chomsky lacked empirical evidence and the complexity of his argument was shallow as there is no proof of his

HUSSERL’S RESPONSE TO CHOMSKY AND SKINNER

Husserl’s theory is based on experience; he argues I am not just a machine; I am the mind (Cunningham 1976). You don’t make predictions before you experience and experience is first person, tested by your own self and you do not hear it from someone else. My thoughts are intentionally directed towards something and phenomenology does not depend on science, it depends on thoughts and experience including structures of experience and enabling conditions (Husserl & Welch 2003).

Husserl wants to bracket “Chomsky and Skinner’s false assumptions of naturalistic attitude that says the best way to account for things is through sciences, he says experience is primary and consciousness constitutes the world, the external world exists therefore he wants to see things as if we experience it first time,”( Cunningham 1976). Husserl wants to ground out a new science of consciousness and epochs everything science says by saying before there is science there has to be a human being experiencing things. He says we missed something in Descartes because he recognized both the physical and mental world but focused on the mental world however it is actually the thoughts or consciousness that are the defining feature and everything in the mental world is based on intentionality (Husserl & Welch 2003). He argues when I think of myself, I think of a mind in a body and your mind is in every aspect of your body, the aspect of embodiment. Everything we think