![]() Nevertheless, there’s been lots of debate around his universal grammar theory for over half a century now. Noam Chomsky is among the most oft-quoted linguists in history. We wind up knowing a lot more about how our languages work than we’re ever overtly taught. We know to say “The boy who is swimming wants to eat lunch” instead of “The boy wants to eat lunch who is swimming.”ĭespite this lack of instructional stimulus, we still learn and use our native languages, understanding the rules that govern them. We learn despite a ‘poverty of stimulus’Ĭhomsky and others have also argued that we learn complex languages, with their intricate grammatical rules and limitations, without receiving explicit instruction.įor example, children automatically grasp the correct way to arrange dependent sentence structures without being taught. But the fact that we all share the same developmental sequence may show we’re hardwired for language.
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