Monday, September 12, 2016

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning

Scientific American: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.

2 comments:

George said...

I took a Linguistics course back in the Sixties and we used Chomsky's book. I was never convinced of his theories.

Bud said...

I think Chomsky is wrong about many things, both inside linguistics and out 8-) But I think his basic general hypothesis that humans are "hard-wired" to learn language is correct and will withstand the test of on-going neurobiological discoveries.