Chomsky on Language Acquisition

According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes. This theory is evidenced by children who live in the same linguistic community without a plethora of different experiences who arrive at comparable grammars. Chomsky thus proposes that "all children share the same internal contraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." (Chomsky, 1977, p.98) Since we live in a biological world, "there is no reason for supposing the mental world to be an exception." And he believes that there is a critical age for learningn a language as is true for the overall development of the human body.

Chomsky's mechanism of language acquisition also links structural linguistics to empiricist thought: "These principles [of structuralism and empiricism] determine the type of grammars that are available in principles. They are associated with an evaluation procedure which, given possible grammars, selects the best one. The evaluation procedure is also part of the biological given. The acquisition of language thus is a process of selection of the best grammar compatible with the available data. If the principles can be made sufficiently restrictive, there will also be a kind of 'discovery procedure.