Abstract
Linguistics is supposed to be the study of linguistic competence. The sentences used by linguists to illustrate their arguments are presumably structures that can be generated by the rules that make up the native speaker's competence. Therefore, all normal native speakers should in principle be capable of processing them. In this study, adult respondents of various educational backgrounds were presented with a series of test sentences based on examples drawn from recent publications in the GB framework. The test was carefully designed to minimize the effects of extrinsic factors such as memory limitations and lapses of attention. It was found that performance increased dramatically with educational achievement, with the least-educated respondents consistently obtaining very low scores. An analysis of the patterns of answers given by respondents of various educational backgrounds revealed that the least-educated speakers were also the most likely to ignore syntactic cues and rely on nonlinguistic strategies in interpreting the test sentences. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to deal with the carefully edited, highly syntacticized structures that one encounters in publications dealing with language is acquired in the course of formal education and is far from universal. This in turn raises doubts about the traditional logical argument for innateness
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call