Nativist Theory

Nativist theory (also called innatism) holds that humans are born with a biologically endowed capacity for language. The central claim is that the knowledge children bring to the task of language acquisition is too rich and too specific to have been learned entirely from environmental input. The theory is most closely associated with Noam Chomsky, whose work from the late 1950s onward launched the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology.

Core Architecture

Universal Grammar (UG)

All human languages, despite enormous surface variation, share a set of deep structural principles. Chomsky proposed that these principles are innate — part of the initial state of the human mind. Children do not learn that sentences have hierarchical structure or that movement rules obey locality constraints; they know this from birth. What varies across languages is captured by parameters — binary switches that the child sets based on exposure to a particular language.

Principles (innate, universal)	Parameters (set by input)
Sentences have phrase structure	Head-initial (English) vs head-final (Japanese)
Movement obeys locality	Pro-drop (Spanish) vs non-pro-drop (English)
Recursion is available	Word order variations (SVO, SOV, etc.)

The Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

The Language Acquisition Device is Chomsky's hypothetical mental module that contains UG and enables children to extract grammatical regularities from input. It is domain-specific — designed for language, not general learning — and operates on principles that do not apply to other cognitive domains.

Poverty of the Stimulus

The strongest argument for nativism. Children receive input that is incomplete (they hear only a fraction of possible sentences), sometimes degraded (false starts, errors, fragments), and critically, lacking negative evidence (children are rarely told which sentences are ungrammatical). Yet by age 5, they command the core grammar of their language, including structures they have never heard. This gap between input and attainment, nativists argue, can only be bridged by innate knowledge.

Supporting evidence includes:

• Rapid, uniform acquisition timelines across languages and cultures
• Systematic developmental errors (e.g., "I goed," "two mouses") that show rule generalisation, not imitation
• Acquisition of structure-dependent rules that could not be induced from surface patterns alone

Critical Period Hypothesis

The Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967) aligns with nativism: the innate language faculty is most active during a biologically constrained window (roughly birth to puberty). After this period, the LAD becomes less accessible, which is why adult learners typically do not achieve native-like attainment.

Problems for SLA

Nativist theory was built to explain first language acquisition, and its application to L2 learning is contested. The central question: do adult L2 learners still have access to UG?

• Full Access: Adults retain UG and can reset parameters for L2. Predicts native-like ultimate attainment is possible.
• Partial Access / Full Transfer: UG is accessible but filtered through L1 parameter settings (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). L1 transfer is the starting point; learners must overcome L1 settings.
• No Access: UG is unavailable to adults. L2 learning relies on general cognitive mechanisms — problem-solving, analogy, memorisation. This would explain why adult L2 acquisition is typically slower, less complete, and more variable than L1 acquisition.

The empirical picture is unresolved. Some L2 learners demonstrate knowledge of UG constraints they could not have learned from input, suggesting some access. But the wide variability in L2 outcomes — unlike the near-uniform success of L1 acquisition — challenges the strongest nativist claims.

Criticisms

• No physical evidence for the LAD. No brain structure or genetic mechanism has been identified as the substrate of Universal Grammar.
• Undervalues social interaction. Sociocultural Theory and Interaction Hypothesis demonstrate that social context is constitutive of acquisition, not merely a trigger.
• Cross-linguistic challenges. Some languages lack features supposedly "universal" (e.g., recursion in Piraha, though this claim is itself contested).
• Usage-Based Theory alternatives. Constructionist and emergentist accounts show that much of what nativists attribute to UG can be learned from frequency patterns, statistical regularities, and general cognitive abilities.

Key References

• Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
• Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley.
• Cook, V. & Newson, M. (2007). Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Blackwell.
• Schwartz, B.D. & Sprouse, R. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40-72.