Innatism and the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

As we have seen before in past weeks on the blog, the Behaviorist theory had its limitations, so during the 1960's an alternative 'generative' account of language appeared, mainly leaded by Chomsky. This alternative view argues that children must be born an innate capacity for language development. Being innate, the acquisition of language by children become easier than it would otherwise be.

Chomsky theorized that children are born with a hard-wired Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in their brains. LAD is a set of language learning tools, intuitive at birth in all children. He later explained this idea into that of Universal Grammar, a set of innate principles and adjustable that are common human languages. The child exploits its LAD to make sense of the utterances heard around it, deriving from this 'primary linguistics data' - the grammar of the language.

LAD also explains human acquisition of the syntatic structures of language and it encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain, it enables the children to analyze language and extract the basic rules.