Topics Language

Question What is the current take on Chomsky's 'language acquisition is hard-wired into the brain' theory? I remember reading ten years or so ago that a scientist had isolated a gene that led to kids having trouble learning to speak normally (I have no citation, unfortunately). Would this be proof that Chomsky was right?

Accepted:
November 8, 2006

Comments

No, that wouldn't be proof that Chomsky was right. No one ever denied that something innate was involved in language acquisition. And for all we've been told, it might be that the gene in question had something to do with a child's ability to dissect the acoustical stream at a stage far prior to anything linguistic.

That said, the empirical evidence continues to suggest that some very general linguistic principles and categories are genetically provided.

On my website there is a draft of a paper, labelled ''Poverty of Stimulus arguments', which provides a reasonably comprehensive review of the evidence that favours the hypothesis that humans have some innate special-purpose machinery dedicated to language acquisition.