Talk:Language acquisition device

Untitled
language acquisition device it is all about language

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Derekrodenbeck.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:11, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Linguistics
Shouldn't this be under linguistics and not psychology? Paxuniv (talk) 03:51, 5 June 2008 (UTC)


 * What do you mean? It's currently categorized under Language acquisition, a subcategory of Psycholinguistics. --D. Monack | talk 17:27, 5 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I just meant that the box that appears to the right of the article gives other psychology links. I think the linguistics template should be there instead. Paxuniv (talk) 04:03, 11 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree and made the switch. Sorry for the delay. —D. Monack talk 20:45, 4 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Hey everyone, I attempted to add a bit more to this, I used two academic resources to give more weight to this subject. They can be further looked into and added to, both interesting topics that weigh this subject. Not a subject matter expert here but did my best to dictate what I read. Feel free to adjust, edit, and add to. Derekrodenbeck (talk) 20:59, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Neurology: Last two paragraphs
These have been recently added and as interesting as they may be don't seem to be relevant to the subject of the article. The LAD is abstract, not literally a region of the brain, and so neurology doesn't seem relevant. I'm happy to be proved wrong on this but the contributor needs to give detail to explain how this is relavant. Also no references are cited.

Not2late (talk) 19:54, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Last Line
Apparently a nueroscientist discovered the source of all human language in the last line of the article. Considering this is, I dunno, kind of a breakthrough, don't you think a source would be in order?

It's kinda like saying that Dr. Steve McBeezle discovered a small brown dwarf star just outside of the oort cloud, which makes our solar system a bianary one, but then citing nothing. such a tease.Jimmyjones22 (talk) 22:53, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

The theory makes absurd predictions.
The nativism called "universal grammar" actually predicts that adaptation to different languages should, by natural selection, have produced groups of humans genetically incapable of learning foreign languages. That racist prediction have been conclusively disproved in lots of studies. Avoiding falsifiability by avoiding extrapolation of theories to their logical extremes is not scientific at all. Furthermore, there is no way to explain why a vast range of redundant linguistic capacities obviously not needed to build a complex language (no language uses the whole worldwide range and some languages only use a very small fraction of it) should have evolved in the first place. This is explained in more detail on the pages "Brain" and "Origin of language" (and to some extent "Piraha"), all on Pure science Wiki, a wiki devoted to the pure scientific method unaffected by academic obsession with status and prestige. 95.209.8.118 (talk) 13:41, 8 January 2013 (UTC)Martin J Sallberg


 * Sallberg, I've never heard of any prediction that a LAD/ universal grammar should produce adaptation to different languages that would result in humans incapable of learning each other's languages. For one thing, there hasn't been sufficient time + isolation for this kind of evolution.  Probably the Australian languages/ peoples were the longest isolated (longer than the speakers of languages of the Americas were from the rest of the world), and that time depth--perhaps 40,000 years?--is just not sufficient time for such biological variation to arise, especially in the absence of any obvious form of selection for it.  (Evolution = variation + selection.)  Also, the mechanisms proposed for universal grammar are generic enough that it's unlikely they could be sufficiently tweaked to produce significant differences, even over much longer periods of isolation.  (Chomsky's recent writings put the UG down to just one thing: recursion.  Hard to tweak that into s.t. that creates major cross-language/ population differences!) Mcswell (talk) 21:51, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Unenlightening
This page is an abomination. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.22.225.158 (talk) 14:03, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Saying children learn a language because they have a LAD is the same as saying that children learn a language because children learn a language. It is unenlightening to claim that an imperceptible and un-disproveable "device" exists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.152.175.206 (talk) 13:00, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Which is probably the reason Chomsky and his followers have abandoned the idea.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:33, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Maunus, not sure where you got that. Chomsky has not abandoned the idea, and he has lots of followers who haven't abandoned it either.  Or maybe you have a citation? And to the User:talk who posted above Maunus, a lot of productive research has gone into what the LAD is, so no; it's not an empty concept, nor is it imperceptible or un-disproveable.  In fact many notions of how the LAD works have been disproven.  Mcswell (talk) 21:37, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Brain?
This is not quite my field – I'm a linguist, but not a psycholinguist nor a neurolinguist – but I'm fairly certain that Chomsky et al. described the LAD as a component of the mind, not the brain. The only mention I find of "brain" in Aspects is in a quotation from Arnauld's Logic. Chomsky elsewhere described the mind as an abstract understanding of the brain. The link to Human brain in the first sentence is therefore misleading, as is the implication (from the second sentence) that scholars are searching for an LAD region of the brain. Cnilep (talk) 02:25, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age
— Assignment last updated by Ian7024 (talk) 07:12, 20 September 2022 (UTC)