Language Acquisition Device

1965

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

Why does it seem so relatively easy for very young children to learn language? Is it, in fact, just a matter of learning by experience what words mean and how to structure them so that meaning is communicated? Some psychologists have thought so: B. F. Skinner, for example, proposed that verbal behavior is primarily a matter of reinforcement.

Linguist Noam Chomsky believed that it wasn’t just, or only, a matter of learning from experience and being rewarded for correct performance. In work that began during the 1950s but reached its clearest expression in the 1960s, he proposed a different theory, one that suggests that humans are born with an innate endowment to learn language; that is, humans universally have the capacity, barring gross pathology, to acquire language.

Chomsky proposed an innate blueprint for language development—the language acquisition device, or LAD—in his 1965 book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. The LAD is a result of the evolutionary adaptation that has given humans the native ability to grasp and apply the underlying rules of language, or grammar. The grammar of language is similar across all languages, even sign language, and this is why children learn language of any kind in approximately the same developmental period.

The theory proved immensely useful in helping linguists understand how children rapidly develop the ability to transform language; in other words, they quickly learn how to use grammar to generate “surface” structures from the “deep” structures. For example, I may write, The young man dropped the ball or The ball was dropped by the young man. The deep structure is the same, but the surface structure—the specific expression—is different. Language and its acquisition is complex, and while Chomsky’s theory generated rich research results, it has not been the only model that has proven useful.

SEE ALSO Apes and Language (1909), Genetic Epistemology (1926)

Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563, depicting a tower built, according to the Book of Genesis, by a monolingual humanity in an effort to prevent the human race from scattering.