Principles of Language Acquisition and Learning
Welcome to Principles of Language Acquisition and Learning. On this page, you will find copies of materials used in class which you can download and print. You will also find links to recommended follow-up reading and supplementary videos.
Click here to download a copy of the full class description.
Click here to download a copy of the Readers' Guide for the class text book, How Languages are Learned by Lightbown and Spada.
Chapter 1
The Wug Test: This video shows an example of the Wug Test in use.
This video is of a speech given by Jean Berko Gleason, the inventor of the Wug Test.
Chapter 2
This is the video "The Great Toy Robbery"mentioned in chapter 2.
Chomsky's ideas about language learning, sometime called the innatist perspective, as still very controversial. Even now, there is a debate about the universal grammar.
This article describes some recent evidence that shows that Chomsky was right. We do have a universal grammar in our heads when we are born.
But this article explains the case against the innatist perspective and shows that we don't have a universal grammar.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct