As everyone knows, Noam Chomsky is both one of the world’s reigning experts on the nature of language and the brain’s acquisition thereof. He is also widely known for his views on various socio-political issues around the globe. I have attended several conferences where his views on language acquisition were the main topic, and at one of these Chomsky himself was actually a participant. I will not pretend that I understand all of the views and issues involved in this very complex topic, but here I shall attempt to track the development of his thought.
As I understand it Chomsky’s initially very influential theory was that the brain arrives already programed to perform certain operations on the verbal input it receives from the surrounding human linguistic world. Thus, barring various defects, all humans come equipped with the innate ability to participate in human linguistic interchange. The human brain is structured in advance to be able to receive and make sense out of the human noises it receives no matter what linguistic input they initially receive. Thus any child born anywhere can learn its mother tongue naturally.
Over the years Chomsky received, and successfully answered, many challenging questions and objections. However, at the conference I attended at MIT in Boston in 1984 he openly admitted that he had found it necessary to alter his initial views. Chomsky now claimed, in a paper entitled “Changing Perspectives on Knowledge and Use of Language,” that although all humans are born with the same cranial apparatus that governs how we in general deal with the various linguistic inputs we receive, these inputs are so varied that they need to be and are sorted out by some intermediary processes which initially respond to the respective inputs. Thus, the innate structural apparatus is not sufficient to fully explain how the brain processes the linguistic input.
Chomsky suggested that it would be helpful to posit an additional cognitive apparatus that functions in between the initial receptors and the linguistic output itself which accounts for the immense diversity thereof. He imaged this additional apparatus as a set of switches which would be set by the interaction between the basic structure of the brain and the empirical input received through linguistic and social interaction. Thus Chomsky admitted that his initial, somewhat rationalistic, views were insufficient to cover the huge variety of subtle differences which are part and parcel of regular human discourse but differ from language to language.
Thus there was now a more “empirical” or experiential dimension to Chomsky’s approach than he had at first acknowledged. Although no young speaker of a language is now seen as already programmed at birth openly receptive to any and all languages, he or she does come with a brain capable of acquiring any language. In addition, each would-be speaker of any language also comes equipped with a set of adjustable switches which can be set in accordance with daily experiential input. These switches are perhaps put in place by virtue of the concrete experiential of each speaker through on-going encounters with one’s environment, both physical and social.
So the question of language acquisition is addressed with a more complex model than Chomsky originally proposed. Language acquisition is now seen as a two-step phenomenon involving both preset categories and ongoing experience. This approach seems to me to be more inline, for instance, with that of the later Wittgenstein for whom linguistic is immensely flexible and to a large degree open-ended. Incidentally, Professor Chomsky seems now to have taken up a semi-permanent position at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he is a frequent speaker on both linguistic and political issues.