Chomsky tried to define the components of the essential tool kit of language — the kinds of mental machinery that allow human language to happen. Where counterexamples have been found, some Chomsky defenders have responded that just because a language lacks a certain tool — recursion, for example — does not mean that it is not in the tool kit. In the same way, just because a culture lacks salt to season food does not mean salty is not in its basic taste repertoire. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning makes Chomsky’s proposals difficult to test in practice, and in places they verge on the unfalsifiable.
A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules. (The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is invoked.) Yet much research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way. Rather young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then, gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.
Thus, young children initially speak with only concrete and simple grammatical constructions based on specific patterns of words: “Where’s the X?”; “I wanna X”; “More X”; “It’s an X”; “I’m X-ing it”; “Put X here”; “Mommy’s X-ing it”; “Let’s X it”; “Throw X”; “X gone”; “Mommy X”; “I Xed it”; “Sit on the X”; “Open X”; “X here”; “There’s an X”; “X broken.” Later, children combine these early patterns into more complex ones, such as “Where’s the X that Mommy Xed?”
Many proponents of universal grammar accept this characterization of children’s early grammatical development. But then they assume that when more complex constructions emerge, this new stage reflects the maturing of a cognitive capacity that uses universal grammar and its abstract grammatical categories and principles.
