[简答题]What is Chomsky’s "Innateness Hypothesis" Explain the reasons why this hypothesis is made.

参考答案: Chomsky believes that language is somewhat innate, and that children are born With what he calls a language acquisition device (LAD), which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning. He argues that children are born with knowledge of the basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge of the basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal. And the study of language can throw some light on the nature of the human mind. This approach to language is a reaction against behaviorism inpsychology and empiricism in philosophy, making linguistics a branch of psychology. This is Chomsky’s "Innateness Hypothesis".
Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis is based on his observations that some important facts can never be otherwise explained adequately. First, children learn their native language very fast and with little effort. Second, children learn their mother tongue in very different environments. They may be good at different things, but in their first language acquisition, their difference is amazingly small. Third, the child learns the total grammar of the language during a limited period of time, from limited exposure to speech. He can not only produce and understand sentences he has heard, but also sentences he has never heard before. What he learns seems to be a set of rules rather than individual sentences. All these suggest that although babies are not born knowing a language, they are born with a predisposition to develop a language in much the same way as they are born with a predisposition to learn to walk.
But this is not the whole picture yet. Chomsky argues that LAD probably consists of three elements: a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.
答案解析: [解析] 本题主要考查的是Chomsky的天赋假设(Innateness Hypothesis)及该假设的由来。回答问题时先要说清楚该假设的内容，再说明为什么提出该假设。