Universal Grammar

Throughout the years, philosophers and psychologists have striven to solve the mind-boggling question of learning by juxtaposing the two competing theories, namely, empiricism and rationalism. They have usually opted for one and ruled out the other on the grounds that it cannot account for learning because theoretical and empirical evidence discredits it. Since 1965, with the publication of Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in which, he explicitly introduces the notion of Universal Grammar and implicitly employs the term to support Fodor's philosophical view of learning in terms of 'language of thought', the rationalistic arguments seem to have taken over this never-ending and perpetual battle. Here in this article, it is argued that despite its popularity among a good number of scholars, the rationalistic account of learning suffers from serious flaws. A conglomerate of empirical and theoretical evidence challenges the notion of 'language of thought'. Self-interpretive power of the language of thought, inaccessibility of cognitive theories to truth conditional meaning, meaningful experiences, inability to test memory, problems with modularity and regulation are simply some of the arguments that might be raised against the idea of 'language of thought'. Finally, a framework for the acquisition of language is presented.

This study addresses the acquisition of the morphological markers in Persian learners of English as a foreign language. To this end, the accuracy order of nine morphemes including plural –s, progressive –ing, copula be, auxiliary be, irregular past tense, regular past tense –ed, third person –s, possessive -ʼs and indefinite articles was studied in 60 teenage Persian EFL learners. Placement and proficiency tests and a demographic questionnaire were employed to collect the data. The total production of 2160 morphemes was manually checked, classified, and counted to rank their acquisition order. The learners’ accuracy order was ranked in a decreased order from 1 to 9 as follows: regular past tense, auxiliary be, copula be, present progressive tense, indefinite articles, plural –s, possessive -ʼs, irregular past tense and third-person singular –s. The Spearman correlation showed that Persian students’ accuracy order had a moderate and weak relationship with the accuracy order of ESL and EFL learners, respectively. This finding proves that Persian EFL learners do not learn English grammatical morphemes in a natural order. Moreover, the universal grammar does not remain fully in these learners. The minor role of UG in EFL acquisition also indicates the important role of transfer in foreign language learning.