Describe Noam Chomsky's theory of language development, noting challenges to his perspective

What will be an ideal response?

Linguist Noam Chomsky believed that language is etched into the structure of the brain. Focusing on grammar, Chomsky reasoned that the rules of sentence organization are too complex to be directly taught to or discovered by even a cognitively sophisticated young child. Rather, he proposed that all children have a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate system that contains a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages. It enables children, no matter which language they hear, to understand and speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words. Evidence that childhood is a sensitive period for language acquisition is consistent with Chomsky's idea of a biologically based language program. But challenges to Chomsky's theory suggest that it, too, provides only a partial account of language development. First, researchers have had great difficulty specifying Chomsky's universal grammar. Critics doubt that one set of rules can account for the extraordinary variation in grammatical forms among the world's 5,000 to 8,000 languages. Second, children's progress in mastering many sentence constructions is gradual, with errors along the way, indicating more learning and discovery than Chomsky assumed.