... general intelligence. The essay will begin by outlining the main tenets of Chomsky's theory of language acquisition. It will then examine evidence that supports Chomsky's theory and evidence that challenges it. In exploring the extent to which Chomsky's theory can account for language developmentse issues, the essay seeks to highlight a number of potential limitations to Furthermore, Principles and Parameters theory states that the properties (parameters) of language vary from language to language and therefore language acquisition is a process of setting the right parameters based on experience. For example, some languages (English and French) require subjects, whereas others (Spanish and Italian) do not. Therefore, the null subject parameter is set to 'off' in English and 'on ' in Spanish (Chomsky, 1981). According to Chomsky, children have an in-built knowledge of the rules of language (linguistic universals). This is known as Universal Grammar, and helps children to extact rules from ...

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