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Reviewing the Mainstream Theories of First Language Acquisition: Does Innate Knowledge of Languages exist?

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DOI: 10.23977/IEMB2020015

Author(s)

Zhejun Zhang, and Ao Chen

Corresponding Author

Zhejun Zhang

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to discuss whether innate knowledge exists and to review the Mainstream theories of First Language Acquisition (FLA). The debate surrounding whether infants have an innate knowledge of languages started around the 4th century BCE, when Plato first raised this question and attempted to answer it. Plato’s student, Aristotle, disagreed with Plato about the existence of innate ideas. The disagreements between the two philosophers inspired people to further discuss the matter in the future. People, such as Tomasello, Chomsky, and Halliday all tried to answer this question. Tomasello came up with the Usage-based approach, which centralizes on meaningful interactions between infants and adults. Chomsky suggests that there is an innate grammar -- the UG (Universal Grammar) -- that helps infants to learn their first language. Halliday’s systemic functional approach suggests there is no innate knowledge of language, and infants all learn their first language after they’re one years old. We believe that this paper could be suitable to those researchers, teachers and students whose interest is FLA. Nonetheless, this paper does not specifically review the child FLA in a multilingual society. We believe that linguistic research can further focus on this gap in the future.

KEYWORDS

Innate idea, Usage-based Approach, Universal Grammar, Systemic Functional Linguistics, First Language Acquisition

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