13. What’s Innatism?

The innatist position as posited by Chomsky was built on the belief that children have been biologically programmed to acquire language – that they possess a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – and that language proficiency develops in a similar way to other biological functions. Graham (2019) stated Chomsky’s hypotheses in these words: “the rules or principles underlying linguistic behavior are abstract (applying to all human languages) and innate (part of our native psychological endowment as human beings)” (§7, para. 12).

Chomsky was therefore reacting to what he saw as the inadequacy of the behaviorist theory of learning based purely on imitation and habit formation through positive reinforcement. As Graham (2019) explained, language learning appears to occur without the need for explicit or detailed teaching, and behaviourism cannot explain how this might be so.

From a Chomskyan perspective, children’s minds are not blank slates on which can be written all the words, phrases and permutations that they need to imitate. Rather, children are born with an innate ability to work out the rules for themselves based on the limited examples of natural language they receive, somehow aligning them to an under- lying internal template that contains the rules that underpin all language systems – what Chomsky termed Universal Grammar (UG). From an innatist perspective, the child’s innate ability is fundamental to L1 development. 

References: 

Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26–58.

East, M. (2021). Foundational principles of task-based language teaching (p. 214). Taylor & Francis.

Graham, G. (2019). Behaviorism. Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/behaviorism.