Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MAXPOOL 1103 days ago
> some evolved language structures in the brain.

That's Chomsky's argument. A small set of constraints for organizing language.

1 comments

This is testable, right?

Put a kid from one language tradition in a spot with a different language tradition, and they won't be able to learn it.

Eg. kids with native mandarin speaking parents adopted to native Indo-European parents fail at learning English, and will be better at learning Mandarin than their peers with Indo-European heritage.

That doesn't work. Children will learn whatever language they are exposed to. That is why Chomsky and others talk in terms of a universal grammar.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the brain has structures that are specific to a particular language.