His 1964 paper "The Capacity of Language Acquisition" sets for the seminal arguments picked up and popularized later by Noam Chomsky in his famous arguments for the innate "language organ".
He presents four arguments for biological innateness of psychological capacities, as constructed in parallel to arguments in biology for the innateness of physical traits:
He died at a young age. These early papers remain a significant legacy.
See Lennenberg, Eric. 1964. "The Capacity of Language Acquisition" in Fodor and Katz, 1964. Fodor, Jerry and Jerrold Katz, eds. 1964. The Structure of Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. The Fodor & Katz volume is a collection of papers around early Chomskyan linguistics, phonology, grammar, semantics.
Search Encyclopedia
|
Featured Article
|