AFAIK all of the animal language studies were trying to prove Chomsky wrong, and they all failed. His work isn't totally explanatory but it's the foundation of our current understanding of how language develops.
Ape sign language studies mostly, but they've also tried to teach language to birds, dolphins, etc and it never works.
The old idea of language development is that when you babble as an infant, you occasionally make words, and your parents reward you for it - thus teaching you language. Chomsky argued that language is too complex to be explained by this mechanism, and it was a major debate in language development for a long time. So the way to test this theory is to try to teach simple language via this mechanism to the most intelligent non-humans we have access to.
The animal studies that looked into this were mostly done with apes and monkeys. You've probably heard of Coco the Gorilla - well she was just one of many that we tried to teach sign language too. Unfortunately, despite the hype and marketing around Coco the results reported by her trainers were never replicated, and a systematic review of all ape language studies (which were done for decades) revealed that basically no ape had ever actually learned sign language - at best they learned a couple of signs and learned to associate those signs with food and attention from their trainers (the same way a dog can learn individual words), at worst they learned basically nothing at all but the trainers (who usually were not fluent in ASL themselves) interpreted random arm movements as valid signs.
Don't think anyone would unironically say he hasn't done quite a bit for linguistics (except ironically, which I enjoy doing because it's funny), but there's a fair amount of his stuff that is fairly controversial
reminder that
is still generally respected for his linguistics work
(although i'm sure someone here with a bigger brain than mine will be able to criticise that effectively too)
AFAIK all of the animal language studies were trying to prove Chomsky wrong, and they all failed. His work isn't totally explanatory but it's the foundation of our current understanding of how language develops.
I mean there are many ways for Chomsky to be wrong about a lot of things even without other animals having language
What are you referring to?
Ape sign language studies mostly, but they've also tried to teach language to birds, dolphins, etc and it never works.
The old idea of language development is that when you babble as an infant, you occasionally make words, and your parents reward you for it - thus teaching you language. Chomsky argued that language is too complex to be explained by this mechanism, and it was a major debate in language development for a long time. So the way to test this theory is to try to teach simple language via this mechanism to the most intelligent non-humans we have access to.
The animal studies that looked into this were mostly done with apes and monkeys. You've probably heard of Coco the Gorilla - well she was just one of many that we tried to teach sign language too. Unfortunately, despite the hype and marketing around Coco the results reported by her trainers were never replicated, and a systematic review of all ape language studies (which were done for decades) revealed that basically no ape had ever actually learned sign language - at best they learned a couple of signs and learned to associate those signs with food and attention from their trainers (the same way a dog can learn individual words), at worst they learned basically nothing at all but the trainers (who usually were not fluent in ASL themselves) interpreted random arm movements as valid signs.
Don't think anyone would unironically say he hasn't done quite a bit for linguistics (except ironically, which I enjoy doing because it's funny), but there's a fair amount of his stuff that is fairly controversial