Abstract
Abstract In recent years, a number of prominent psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget have expressed opposition to Chomskyan nativism as an explanation of how human beings learn languages. On close examination, it is found that Chomsky's argumentation that led him to formulate his peculiar version of the nativistic hypothesis is deficient at a number of points: (1) his argumentation from the syntax of natural languages is incorrect, (2) his argument from the ‘degenerate’ data available to the child learning a language is based on insufficient data, and (3) his argument requires belief in the largely unsupportable hypothesis of Lamarckian evolution. As a result, an alternative is suggested based on the works of Piagetian and neo-Piagetian scholars and the two-stage hypothesis of Gallagher.
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