Test List

His research looked for the underlying computational structure of language and proposed a set of procedures that would create “well-formed” sentences.

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.

This way of talking about language resonated with many scholars eager to em­­brace a computational approach to ... well ... everything.

First, he posited that the languages people use to communicate in everyday life behaved like mathematically based languages of the newly emerging field of computer science.

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.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module.

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.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module.

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.

In the second half of the 20th century, it was becoming ever clearer that our unique evolutionary history was responsible for many aspects of our unique human psychology, and so the theory resonated on that level as well.