Language Development - Biological Preconditions

Biological Preconditions

Evolutionary biologists are skeptical of the claim that syntactic knowledge is transmitted in the human genome. However, many researchers claim that the ability to acquire such a complicated system is unique to the human species. Non-biologists also tend to believe that our ability to learn spoken language may have been developed through the evolutionary process and that the foundation for language may be passed down genetically. The ability to speak and understand human language requires a specific vocal apparatus as well as a nervous system with certain capabilities.

One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes capacities specific to language acquisition, often referred to as universal grammar. For fifty years, linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning. In particular, he has proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way, arguing that children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD). However, since he developed the Minimalist Program, his latest version of theory of syntactic structure, Chomsky has reduced the elements of universal grammar which are in his opinion to be prewired in humans to just the principle of recursion, thus voiding most of the nativist endeavor.

Researchers who believe that grammar is learned rather than innate, have hypothesized that language learning results from general cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their human interactants. It has also recently been suggested that the relatively slow development of the prefrontal cortex in humans may be one reason that humans are able to learn language, whereas other species are not.