A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

children had to be biologically predisposed to acquire language. Chomsky's
^,nativist' theory of first language acquisition (1965) postulates the existence of a
domaine-specific innate language faculty, a Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
and specific procedures for the construction of a grammar. Chomsky's theory
was underpinned by two major considerations, the poverty of the stimulus and
the degeneracy of the stimulus. The child knows aspects of language or
grammar which he could not have derived from the evidence available. What
the stimulus to which the child is exposed lacks but which nevertheless forms
part ofthe child's eventual knowledge of language, Chomsky argued, must
therefore be produced by the organism from its inner resources. The language
faculty must account for those aspects of knowledge of language for which
there is no evidence in the data available to the child:

"A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the
degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the
striking uniformity of the resulting grammars, and their independence of
intelligence, motivation and emotional state, over wide ranges of variation,
leave little hope that much of the structure of language can be learned by an
organism initially uninformed as to its general character" (Chomsky, 1965: 58)

The degeneracy ofthe stimulus argument is based on the fact that speech does
not generally consist of complete and grammatically well-formed sentences.
Children are frequently exposed to imperfect linguistic data but nevertheless
manage to separate the underlying rules of the language from those aspects
which are inessential or even misleading:

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