earticle

영어

The legitimacy of Universal Grammar, in particular, Language Acquisition Device (LAD; Chomsky, 1984, 1995, 2000, 2004), has been widely argued for from both the conceptual and empirical perspective. This paper is to provide an empirical support for LAD in light of the neurolinguistic aspect by looking into the experiments conducted in Petitto(2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) and reinterpreting the experiment results. In particular, this paper articulates the substantial similarities between oral language and hand (sign) language such that LAD is argued for as a legitimate abstract concept to unveil the common ground for such similarities. Accordingly, it is the presence of LAD that makes human language differ from communication systems of animals. (Hankyong National University)