Publication Details
Abstract
The linguistic philosophy of Noam Chomsky essentially reinvented the nature of cognitive science by viewing language as an inbuilt biological capacity, rather than as a learned behavior. The paper explores the biological design of linguistic competency, with a focus on the paradigm shift between behaviorist stimulus-response theories and the mentalist approach of Transformational Generative Grammar. Although the presence of Universal Grammar is extensively reported, there still seems to be considerable gap in the understanding how to balance the hard structural vestiges of "I-language" to the various social-functional realities of "E-language" The study uses a theoretical analysis of seminal texts in a qualitative approach to analyzing the functional mechanics of the Language Acquisition Device as well as the Critical Period Hypothesis. The results show that the human linguistic ability is a biological species-specific property, genetically programmed to act via specialized mental subsystems, without relying on other cognitive capabilities. Findings verify the existence of the fundamental concepts of UG that are constant throughout the species, so that children can acquire morphological and syntactic competency rapidly in a maturationally determined time-span by parameter setting. This biological model has far-reaching consequences, as it brings together the fields of linguistics, psychology, and biology in the realm of biolinguistics. The framework provides a scientific foundation to the human mental lexicon and offers a critical basis to the current computational linguistics and cognitive science.