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Eric Lenneberg
(1921 - 1975) was a
linguist who pioneered ideas on
language acquisition and
cognitive psychology more
generally about innateness.
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:
- Universal
appearance of a trait at a single time across a species. "Species typical"
traits.
- Universal
appearance across time for a group. Not just an artifact of cultural
history. Again, "species typical" diagnostic feature.
- No learning of
the trait is possible.
- Individual
development of a trait rigidly follows a given schedule regardless of the
particular experience of the organism.
He died at a
young age. These early papers remain a significant legacy.
Bibliography
- 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.
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