1. Discuss the influence of Noam Chomsky in our understanding of language and communication in the pre-school years.

Key Points:

• Children rarely copy adults’ word utterances.
• Consider Chomsky’s (1965, 1972), suggestion that it is impossible to account for children’s language acquisition in terms of traditional learning theories.
• Instead, Chomsky maintained that any theory involved in coming to grips with a human language has to be extraordinarily complex. It must be general enough to accommodate any language that a child is exposed to, and it must be shared by all normal humans (because we all learn a language, and we all do so at roughly the same pace).
• Consequently, Chomsky argues that the child must have some innate knowledge of what the structure of language will be like.
• Chomsky has many supporters, but also many critics , and these should be discussed by the student. For example, there is considerable evidence that parents do play a role in their children’s language acquisition.