Young researchers in Amsterdam rule out Chomsky
06 Jun 2008
Three researchers at the University of Amsterdam have removed a cornerstone from the foundation of Noam Chomsky's language theory.
This theory argues that the essence of grammar, as it is used by adults, is inborn. The researchers have now refuted this.
Their research shows that such rudimental knowledge is not in place at birth. On the contrary: as the University of Amsterdam formulates it in their press message, children develop their grammar by themselves, "based on generalizations of concrete language observations". Through watching, listening and imitating, their grammatical insight grows.
These research findings have not gone unnoticed. The article Children’s grammars grow more abstract with age – Evidence from an automatic procedure for identifying the productive units of language has won the Cognitive Science 2008 best paper award in applied cognitive modeling. The award will be presented in July at the Annual Conference of Cognitive Science (CogSci 2008) in Washington.
The winners all work at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.