Page "Psycholinguistics" Paragraph 13

The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959.

This review helped to start what has been termed " the cognitive revolution " in psychology.

Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features, such as recursion, are " hard-wired " in the brain.

These abilities are thought to be beyond the grasp of the most intelligent and social non-humans.

According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, yet at the time there was no evidence that children receive sufficient input to learn all the rules of their language ( see poverty of the stimulus ).

Hence, there must be some other innate mechanism that endows a language ability to humans.

Such a language faculty is, according to the innatist theory, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.