The Innateness Hypothesis: Noam Chomsky Debates B. F. Skinner

Noam Chomsky reviewed B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America and convincingly presented twelve types of evidence that language is basically innate, not learned. Chomsky point out that even though language is very complex, and even though children have very poor language models (like mothers and caregivers who use “baby talk”), all humans learn a spoken language, and no non-humans learn a spoken language. There are many human-language universals, and these are only a small subset of semiotic possibilities; computer languages don’t have these same natural-language constraints (embedding, cross-over, A over A, etc.). There is a critical age for foreign-language acquisition (around puberty). There is a sequence in language acquisition (holophrastic, pivot-open, telegraphic, adult).

Furthermore, human language is rule-governed (like mathematics); it is not memorized. Human language is very creative. Except for small-talk, almost all sentences are novel, and language can adjust to new situations (unlike bee-language for unexpected placing of honey source). 10. Human language has duality. A limited number of symbols are reused in many different ways. Human language has displacement in Time, Place, and Truth. And human language is not predictable. Given a particular stimulus, there is a much wider range of responses for humans than for animals.

All of these facts support the assumption that there is a great deal of language program in the human mind that is not in the mind of any other animal. It should be noted, however, that this language preprograming is broad-brush, not narrow-brush, because the pre-programing in the human brain is not specific enough to warrant a particular language to emerge.