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This Is Like That
100
What the speaker actually says or writes.
What is Surface Structure?
100
Noam Chomsky
Who is one of America's best-known linguists?
100
Chomsky thinks that language acquisition is biologically innate in humans.
Why would Chomsky say "It is misleading that language is learned"?
100
Deducing smaller patterns from larger ones.
What is Deductive reasoning?
100
Children proceed from general rules of grammar to specific rules of grammar.
How is the concept of Universal Grammar like Deductive Reasoning?
200
What a speaker has subconsciously internalized about their language.
What is Deep Structure?
200
Well known linguist and proponent of the structural approach.
Who is Leonard Bloomfield?
200
The relationship between language and the world.
What is Chomsky trying to discover?
200
Is any of what we know innate as opposed to being acquired through experience?
What is one of the Platonic questions that Chomsky seeks to answer?
200
Chomsky and Socrates both questioned established orthodoxies and incited debate and controversy during their lifetimes.
How is Chomsky a little like Socrates?
300
Tries to explain human behavior as a series of stimulus-response activities.
What is Behaviorism?
300
Proponent of Behaviorism
Who is B.F. Skinner?
300
Taking a cruise to Europe.
What was Chomsky doing when he decided to pursue his ideas on language learning?
300
Chomsky thinks that Behaviorism does little to explain language acquisition. He thought that language acquisition is not a consequence of reinforcement and punishment as Behaviorism would indicate.
Why did Chomsky feel that Behaviorism was inadequate?
300
Chomsky and Einstein proposed ideas in their respective fields that sought to answer questions that were not answered by the standard explanations of their peers. Their ideas led researchers in new directions.
Why is Noam Chomsky's work in Linguistics like Albert Einstein's work on Physics?
400
A system of rules used to generate grammatical sentences or utterances.
What is Generative Grammar?
400
Colleague of Chomsky who had also pointed out limitations of Behaviorism on language acquisition.
Who Karl Lashly?
400
Chomsky's example of a meaningless sentence that is still grammatically correct.
What is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"?
400
Fixed principles are the mental grammars speakers have internalized based on a finite number of examples. Open options is the nearly infinite number of sentences and utterances that can be constructed from the mental grammars.
What is meant by the concepts of fixed principles and open options?
400
Shakespeare constrained himself to iambic pentameter but created a wide variety of unique utterances within that framework.
How is Shakespeare's use of Iambic Pentameter similar to the concepts of Fixed Principles and Open Options?
500
The idea that there is a biological component to the ability to learn grammar.
What is Universal Grammar?
500
Proposed a model of Bicameral Brain development that borrowed from both Darwin and Chomsky.
Who is Julian Jaynes?
500
Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner
What is the book that Chomsky reviewed that brought him notice?
500
Noam Chomsky believed that language acquisition was a matter of parameter setting and that initially children focus on simple sentences and filter other language out until they have mastered the fixed principles.
Why would Noam Chomsky say that language acquisition does not require language instruction?
500
Children learn a grammar in whatever culture they reside and that children have an innate ability to master grammar. The process of language acquisition varies little between cultures so the process must be universal.
Why would Noam Chomsky think that there is Universal Grammar that underlies all language acquisition?