Chomsky 的天生論與Piaget 的認知論一直是研究語言習得者爭論的問題
。許多研究已指出認知發展在語言發展中的重要性,因此,Piaget的理論被
引用為本論文的理論架構。受試者是 96名6到11歲的兒童。他們分別判
斷16句語意錯誤和16句句法錯誤的句子。語意錯誤的句子分為四類,是根
據Piaget的發展理論設計的。句法錯誤的句子根據其句型的不同也分為四
類,目的在測知兒童這四類句型的發展順序。實驗結果顯示, Piaget的理
論不足以解釋兒童的語言發展。解釋語言發展最完整的理論必須包括物理
世界,語言世界,及人類世界的影響。 Language acquisition has long
been a polemical problem, with the debating focusing on the
innateness hypothesis by Noam Chomsky and the constructivism by
Jean Piaget. Much research has indicated the impossibility to
exclude the role of cognitive growth in language development;
therefore, Piaget's developmental stages are adopted here as
our theo- retical framework. 96 children aged from 6 to 11
years of age were asked to judge 32 Chinese semantically and
syn- tactically anomalous sentences. The former consists of
four types of sentences, the judgments of which require child-
ren's development of decentration. The latter consists of four
distinctive types of sentences which serve as a pre- liminary
test to demonstrate children's developmental stages of these
four sentence types. The experimental data in- dicate that
Piaget's theory is not sufficient to explain children's
language development. The most possible and complete approach
to explain language acquisition is the one which accommodates
the influences of the physical world, the linguistic world and
the human world.