Noam Chomsky's early work was at the core of the “cognitive revolution” in the 1950s-60s, leading to a paradigm shift from a behavioralist to a mentalistic approach to human psychology. Central to this revolution has been the question of how infants learn language. Here, we provide an overview of how the generative enterprise has shaped research on language acquisition over the last decades. We argue that a large body of empirical knowledge about infants' representation of grammar has accumulated. Many of these questions would most likely not have been investigated empirically without the impetus of such a mentalistic approach.
Abboub, Nawal, Thierry Nazzi and Judit Gervain. 2016. Prosodic grouping at birth. Brain and Language 162. 46–59.
Abney, Steven Paul . 1987. English NP in its sentential aspect. Doctoral dissertation. MIT.
Bastiaansen, Marcel and Peter Hagoort. 2006. Oscillatory neuronal dynamics during language comprehension. Progress in Brain Research 159. 179–196.
Bastiaansen, Marcel, Lilla Magyari and Peter Hagoort. 2010. Syntactic unification operations are reflected in oscillatory dynamics during on-line sentence comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22. 1333–1347.
Berko, Jean . 1958. The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14. 150–177.
Bernard, Carline and Judit Gervain. 2012. Prosodic cues to word order: What level of representation? Frontiers in Language Sciences 3. 451.
Best, Catherine T . 1994. The emergence of native-language phonological influences in infants: A perceptual assimilation model. In J. C. Goodman and H. C. Nusbaum (eds.) The development of speech perception: The transition from speech sounds to spoken words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 167–224.
Bickerton, Derek . 2016. Roots of language. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Boas, Franz . 1940. Race, language and culture. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Braine, Martin D. S . 1971. On two types of models on the internalization of grammars. In D. I. Slobin (ed.) The ontogenesis of grammar. New York: Academic Press. 153–18.
Bybee, Joan L. and Paul Hopper (eds.). 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Chen, Jiani, Danielle van Rossum and Carel Ten Cate. 2015. Artificial grammar learning in zebra finches and human adults: XYX versus XXY. Animal Cognition 18. 151.
Chomsky, Noam . 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam . 1959. A review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal behavior. Language 35. 26–58.
Chomsky, Noam . 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam . 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, Noam . 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam . 2007. Approaching UG from below. In U. Sauerland and H.-M. Gärtner (eds.) Interfaces + recursion = language? Chomsky's minimalism and the view from syntax–semantics. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1–29.
Christiansen, Morten H. and Simon Kirby. 2003. Language evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christophe, Anne, Teresa Guasti and Marina Nespor. 1997. Reflections on phonological bootstrapping: Its role for lexical and syntactic acquisition. Language and Cognitive Processes 12. 585–612.
Christophe, Anne, Marina Nespor, Maria Teresa Guasti and Brit Van Ooyen. 2003. Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: The case of the head-direction parameter. Developmental Science 6. 211–220.
Crain, Stephen . 1991. Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14. 597–650.
Crain, Stephen and Mineharu Nakayama. 1987. Structure dependence in grammar formation. Language 63. 522–543.
Curtiss, Susan, Victoria A. Fromkin, Stephen Krashen, David Rigler and Marilyn Rigler. 1974. The linguistic development of genie. Language 50. 528–554.
Cutler, Anne. and David M. Carter. 1987. The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech and Language 2. 133–42.
Dawson, Colin and LouAnn Gerken. 2009. From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not. Cognition 111. 378–382.
Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine, Stanislas Dehaene and Lucie Hertz-Pannier. 2002. Functional neuroimaging of speech perception in infants. Science 298. 2013–2015.
Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine, Lucie Hertz-Pannier, Jessica Dubois and Stanislas Dehaene. 2008. How does early brain organization promote language acquisition in humans? European Review 399. 399–411.
Dryer, Matthew S . 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68. 81–138.
Eimas, Peter D., Einar R. Siqueland, Peter W. Jusczyk and James Vigorito. 1971. Speech perception in infants. Science 171. 303–306.
Elman, Jeff, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi and Kim Plunkett. 1996. Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Endress, Ansgar D., Marina Nespor and Jacques Mehler. 2009. Perceptual and memory constraints on language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13. 348–353.
Faulkner, Kathlene F. and David B. Pisoni. 2013. Some observations about cochlear implants: Challenges and future directions. Neuroscience Discovery 1. 9.
Fitch, W. Tecumseh and M. D. Hauser. 2004. Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate. Science 303. 377–380.
Frank, Michael C., Jonathan A. Slemmer, Gary F. Marcus and Scott P. Johnson. 2009. Information from multiple modalities helps five-month-olds learn abstract rules. Developmental Science 12. 504–509.
Franklin, Tamara B. and Isabelle M. Mansuy. 2010. Epigenetic inheritance in mammals: Evidence for the impact of adverse environmental effects. Neurobiology of disease 39. 61–65.
Friederici, Angela D . 2011. The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Reviews 91. 1357–1392.
Friederici, Angela D., Manuela Friedrich and Anne Christophe. 2007. Brain responses in 4-month-old infants are already language specific. Current Biology 17. 1208–1211.
Friederici, Angela D. and Stefan A. Frisch. 2000. Verb argument structure processing: The role of verb-specific and argument-specific information. Journal of Memory and Language 43. 476–507.
Friederici, Angela D., Shirley-Anne Ruschemeyer, Anja Hahne and Christian J. Fiebach. 2003. The role of left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension: Localizing syntactic and semantic processes. Cerebral Cortex 13. 170–177.
Fukui, Naoki . 1986. A theory of category projection and its applications. Doctoral dissertation. MIT.
Gentner, Timothy Q., Kimberly Fenn, Daniel Margoliash and Howard Nusbaum. 2006. Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds. Nature 44. 1204–1207.
Gervain, Judit, Iris Berent and Janet F. Werker. 2012. Binding at birth: The newborn brain detects identity relations and sequential position in speech. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24. 564–574.
Gervain, Judit, Irene de la Cruz Pavia and LouAnn Gerken. 2018. Behavioural and imaging studies of infant artificial grammar learning. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12400.
Gervain, Judit, Jacques Mehler, Janet F. Werker, Charles A. Nelson, Gergely Csibra, Sarah Lloyd-Fox, Mohinish Shukla and Richard N. Aslin. 2011. Near-infrared spectroscopy: A report from the McDonnell Infant Methodology Consortium. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 1. 22–46.
Gervain, Judit, Marina Nespor, Reiko Mazuka, Ryota Horie and Jacques Mehler. 2008. Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese–Italian cross-linguistic study. Cognitive psychology 57. 56–74.
Gervain, Judit and Janet F. Werker. 2012. Learning non-adjacent regularities at age 0;7. Journal of Child Language FirstView. 1–13.
Gervain, Judit and Janet F. Werker. 2013. Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Nature Communications 4. 1490.
Gleitman, Lila . 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1. 3–55.
Gleitman, Lila R. and Barbara Landau. 1994. The acquisition of the lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gleitman, Lila R. and Eeric Wanner. 1982. Language acquisition: The state of the state of the art. In E. Wanner and L. R. Gleitman (eds.) Language acquisition: The state of the art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 3–48.
Gomez, R. L. and L. Gerken. 1999. Artificial grammar learning by 1-year-olds leads to specific and abstract knowledge. Cognition 70. 109–135.
Gomez, R. L. and L. Gerken. 2000. Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4. 178–186.
Gräff, Johannes and Isabelle M. Mansuy. 2008. Epigenetic codes in cognition and behaviour. Behavioural Brain Research 192. 70–87.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.). 1978. Universals of human language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298. 1569–1579.
Hochmann, Jean-Remy, Ansgar D. Endress and Jacques Mehler. 2010. Word frequency as a cue for identifying function words in infancy. Cognition 115. 444–457.
Hochmann, Jean-Remy, Azadpour Mahan and Mehler Jacques. 2008. Do humans really learn AnBn artificial grammars from exemplars? Cognitive Science 32. 1021–1036.
Jirtle, Randy L. and Michael K. Skinner. 2007. Environmental epigenomics and disease susceptibility. Nature reviews genetics 8. 253–262.
Johnson, Jacqueline S. and Elissa L. Newport. 1989. Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology 21. 60–100.
Johnson, Scott P., Keith J. Fernandes, Michael C. Frank, Natasha Kirkham, Gary Marcus, Hugh Rabagliati and Jonathan A. Slemmer. 2009. Abstract rule learning for visual sequences in 8-and 11-month-olds. Infancy 14. 2–18.
Kegl, Judy . 2002. Language emergence in a language-ready brain. Directions in Sign Language Acquisition 2. 207.
Kral, Andrej and Anu Sharma. 2012. Developmental neuroplasticity after cochlear implantation. Trends in Neurosciences 35. 111–122.
Kucera, Henry and W. Nelson Francis. 1967. Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence: Brown University Press.
Kuhl, Patricia K . 1993. Innate predispositions and the effects of experience in speech perception: The Native Language Magnet Theory. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, P. Jusczyk, P. McNeilage and J. Morton (eds.) Developmental neurocognition: Speech and face processing in the first year of life. Dordrecht: Springer. 259–274.
Kuhl, Patricia K . 2010. Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition. Neuron 67. 713–727.
Kutas, Marta and Cyma K. van Petten. 1988. Event-related brain potential studies of language. Advances in Psychophysiology 3. 139–187.
Landau, Barbara, Lila R. Gleitman and Barbara Landau. 1985. Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lany, Jill and Jenny R. Saffran. 2010. From statistics to meaning: Infants' acquisition of lexical categories. Psychological Science 21. 284–291.
LeCun, Yann, Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. Deep learning. Nature 521. 436–444.
Lenneberg, Eric H. (ed.). 1967. Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley.
Lewkowicz, David J . 2000. The development of intersensory temporal perception: An epigenetic systems/limitations view. Psychological Bulletin 126. 281–308.
Lidz, Jeffrey, Henry Gleitman and Lila R. Gleitman. 2003. Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of Universal Grammar. Cognition 87. 151–178.
Liu, Liang, Thomas van Groen, Inga Kadish and Trygve O. Tollefsbol. 2009. DNA methylation impacts on learning and memory in aging. Neurobiology of Aging 30. 549–556.
MacWhinney, Brian . 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (Third edition). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Malassis, Raphaëlle, Arnaud Rey and Joël Fagot. 2018. Non-adjacent dependencies processing in human and non-human primates. Cognitive Science 42. 1677–1699.
Marchetto, Erika and Luca L. Bonatti. 2015. Finding words and word structure in artificial speech: The development of infants' sensitivity to morphosyntactic regularities. Journal of Child Language 42. 873–902.
Marcus, Gary F. 1993. Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition 46. 53–85.
Marcus, Gary F. 2018. Deep learning: A critical appraisal. arXiv 1801.0063.
Marcus, Gary F., Keith J. Fernandes and Scott P. Johnson. 2007. Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychological Science 18. 387.
Marcus, Gary F., Sugumaran Vijayan, Shoba Bandi Rao and Peter M. Vishton. 1999. Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science 283. 77–80.
Mattock, Karen, Monika Molnar, Linda Polka and Denis Burnham. 2008. The developmental course of lexical tone perception in the first year of life. Cognition 106. 1367–1381.
Maurer, Daphne and Janet F. Werker. 2014. Perceptual narrowing during infancy: A comparison of language and faces. Developmental Psychobiology 56. 154–178.
Minagawa-Kawai, Yasuyo, Koichi Mori, Nozomi Naoi and Shozo Kojima. 2007. Neural attunement processes in infants during the acquisition of a language-specific phonemic contrast. Journal of Neuroscience 27. 315–321.
Mora, Daniela M. de la, Marina Nespor and Juan M. Toro. 2012. Do humans and nonhuman animals share the grouping principles of the iambic–trochaic law? Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 75. 1–9.
Morgan, James L. and Katherine Demuth. 1996. Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Musso, Mariacristina, Andrea Moro, Volkmar Glauche, Michel Rijntjes, Jürgen Reichenbach, Christian Büchel and Cornelius Weiller. 2003. Broca's Area and the language instinct. Nature Neuroscience 6. 774–781.
Narayan, Chandan R., Janet F. Werker and Patrice Speeter Beddor. in press. Acoustic salience affects speech perception in infancy: Evidence from nasal place discrimination. Developmental Science.
Nespor, Marina . 1990. On the rhythm parameter in phonology. In I. Roca (ed.) Logical issues in language acqisition. Dordrecht: Foris. 157–175.
Nespor, Marina, Mohinish Shukla, Ruben van de Vijver, Cinzia Avesani, Hanna Schraudolf and Caterina Donati. 2008. Different phrasal prominence realization in VO and OV languages. Lingue e Linguaggio 7. 1–28.
Nespor, Marina and Irene Vogel. 1986. Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.
Pelucchi, Bruna, Jessica F. Hay and Jenny R. Saffran. 2009. Learning in reverse: Eight-month-old infants track backward transitional probabilities. Cognition 113. 244–47.
Pena, Marcela, Atsushi Maki, Damir Kovacic, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Hideaki Koizumi, Furio Bouquet and Jacques Mehler. 2003. Sounds and silence: An optical topography study of language recognition at birth. PNAS 100. 11702–11705.
Petkov, Christopher I. and William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2018. Editorial overview: The evolution of language as a neurobiological system. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, The Evolution of Language 21. v–xii.
Pinker, Steven . 1984. Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pinker, Steven and P. Bloom. 1990. Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13. 707–784.
Poeppel, David . 2014. The neuroanatomic and neurophysiological infrastructure for speech and language. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 28. 142–149.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz. 2002. Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review 19. 9–50.
Pulvermüller, Friedemann . 1999. Words in the brain's language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22. 253–336.
Ravignani, Andrea, Ruth-Sophie Sonnweber, Nina Stobbe and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2013. Action at a distance: Dependency sensitivity in a new world primate. Biology Letters 9. 20130852.
Reber, Arthur S . 1967. Implicit learning of synthetic languages: The role of instructional set. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 2. 88–94.
Reber, Arthur S . 1969. Transfer of syntactic structure in synthetic languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology 81. 115–119.
Rey, Arnaud, Laure Minier, Raphaëlle Malassis, Louisa Bogaerts and Joël Fagot. 2019. Regularity extraction across species: Associative learning mechanisms shared by human and non-human primates. Topics in Cognitive Science 11. 573–586.
Roth, Tania L. and J. David Sweatt. 2009. Regulation of chromatin structure in memory formation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 19. 336–342.
Saffran, Jenny R., R. N. Aslin and E. L. Newport. 1996. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274. 1926–1928.
Saffran, Jenny R., Rebecca L. Seibel, Seth D. Pollak and Anna Shkolnik. 2007. Dog is a dog is a dog. Infant rule learning is not specific to language. Cognition 105. 669–680.
Sato, Yutaka, Yuko Sogabe and Reiko Mazuka. 2010. Development of hemispheric specialization for lexical pitch-accent in Japanese infants. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22. 2503–2513.
Selkirk, Elisabeth O . 1984. Phonology and syntax. The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Senghas, Ann and Marie Coppola. 2001. Children creating language: How Nicaraguan sign language acquired a spatial grammar. Psychological Science 12. 323–328.
Shi, Rushen, Janet F. Werker and James L. Morgan. 1999. Newborn infants' sensitivity to perceptual cues to lexical and grammatical words. Cognition 72. B11–B21.
Skinner, Burhus F . 1957. Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton.
Slater, Alan, Paul C. Quinn, David J. Kelly, Kang Lee, Christopher A. Longmore, Paula R. McDonald and Olivier Pascalis. 2010. The shaping of the face space in early infancy: Becoming a native face processor. Child Development Perspectives 4. 205–211.
Snow, Catherine E . 1987. Relevance of the notion of a Critical Period to Language Acquisition. In M. H. Bornstein (ed.) Sensitive periods in development: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 183–209.
Snow, Catherine E. and Marian Hoefnagel-Hohle. 1978. The critical period for language acquisition: Evidence for second language learning. Child Development 49. 1114–1128.
Spierings, Michelle, Jeroen Hubert and Carel ten Cate. 2017. Selective auditory grouping by zebra finches: Testing the Iambic–Trochaic Law. Animal Cognition 20. 665–675.
Teinonen, Tuomas, Vineta Fellman, Risto Näätänen, Paavo Alku and Minna Huotilainen. 2009. Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials. BMC Neuroscience 10. 21.
Tomasello, Michael . 2000. Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74. 209–253.
Toro, Juan M., Marina Nespor and Judit Gervain. 2016. Frequency-based organization of speech sequences in a nonhuman animal. Cognition 146. 1–7.
Turennout, Miranda van, Peter Hagoort and Colin M. Brown. 1998. Brain activity during speaking: From syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds. Science 280. 572–574.
Waddington, Conrad H . 1942. Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters. Nature 150. 563.
Watson, Tamara L., Rachel A. Robbins and Catherine T. Best. 2014. Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words: An integrated approach. Developmental Psychobiology 56. 1454–1481.
Weikum, Whitney. M., Tim F. Oberlander, Takao K. Hensch and Janet F. Werker. 2012. Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (Supplement 2). 17221–17227.
Werker, Janet F. and Takao K. Hensch. 2015. Critical periods in speech perception: New directions. Annual Review of Psychology 66. 173–196.
Werker, Janet F. and Richard C. Tees. 1984. Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7. 49–63.
Wilson, Benjamin, Heather Slater, Yukiko Kikuchi, Alice E. Milne, William D. Marslen-Wilson, Kenny Smith and Christopher I. Petkov. 2013. Auditory artificial grammar learning in macaque and marmoset monkeys. Journal of Neuroscience 33. 18825–18835.
Zhang, Tie-Yuan and Michael J. Meaney. 2010. Epigenetics and the environmental regulation of the genome and its function. Annual Review of Psychology 61. 439–466.