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214 PILLAR 2 Development and LearningLanguage Acquisition 13-2 What is the evidence for each of the competing theories of language acquisition? Linguist Noam Chomsky believes that our brains are wired to process vocabulary and rules of grammar virtually without effort. 6 , 7 According to this view, we have a predisposition to language%u2014it%u2019s part of our heritage as a human species, just as flying is part of a bird%u2019s heritage. Just as hearing children learn to speak without being formally taught, deaf children with no instruction in language will develop gestures to communicate and use grammatical rules to govern the use of those gestures. 8 But is it part of our heritage to speak a particular language? Imagine bending over the crib of your firstborn child, putting the baby to sleep for the night. The child looks up at you, smiles sleepily, and says, %u201c Bonne nuit %u201d%u2014even though nobody in your family, nor any of your child%u2019s caregivers, speak French. You might be amazed, and perhaps even a little nervous. Why? This is where nurture steps in. B. F. Skinner, famous for his studies of the effects of rewards on behavior, maintained that language learning is nothing special: we learn it just as we learn everything else. Thus, he said, we learn our language through association (linking certain sounds with certain people or objects), imitation (doing what we see others doing, including their manner of speaking), and receiving (or not receiving) rewards (hugs, smiles, and so on). 9 with no ability to read or write use complicated grammar in their everyday speech. Such grammar, for example, has specific rules for placing adjectives (do we say red rose or rose red? ). Grammar is part of our spoken language, and how we learn it and everything else we call language has generated a lot of debate in psychology. You probably won%u2019t be surprised to find that this debate focuses on the nature and nurture issue. Answer to the question at the start of this section: consider how gh is pronounced in the word enough, how o is pronounced in the word women , and how tiis pronounced in the word emotion . That%u2019s right %u2014 ghotiis pronounced fish!1. I qualifies as a. a phoneme. b. a morpheme. c. a word. d. All of the above. 2. How many phonemes are used in the word applesauce? How many morphemes?a. 3; 3 b. 3; 2 c. 6; 2 d. 6; 3 3. Does English have more morphemes, or more phonemes? 4. ____________ is a system of rules governing the production of meaningful communication. MAKE IT STICK! NOAM CHOMSKY (1928%u2013)Linguist who argues that children have a predisposition to learn language, as though their brains were hardwired to pick up vocabulary and rules of grammar. SASCHA SCHUERMANN/AFP/ Getty Images%u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.