Universal Grammar

Universal grammar is the hypothesis that the capacity for human language is innate and biologically wired into the human brain, and that all human languages, despite their surface diversity, therefore share a common underlying structural foundation determined by this shared innate faculty. Linguist Noam Chomsky developed the theory beginning in the late 1950s, most influentially in his 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, arguing that children acquire the complex grammar of their native language far too quickly and from too limited and imperfect an input of example sentences for the ability to be explained by general learning alone, a position he termed the poverty of the stimulus argument. Under the theory, universal grammar supplies a shared set of innate structural principles and constraints common to every human language, while the particular grammar rules a child ends up with are set by exposure to their specific native language during childhood. The theory has remained highly influential in linguistics while also attracting sustained scientific debate, with critics arguing that language acquisition can instead be adequately explained through general-purpose statistical learning mechanisms operating on the language a child actually hears.