The agenda in language acquisition studies was set by Noam Chomsky’s assertion (1965)
that language is an innately acquired faculty. Chomsky’s arguments were based upon
aspects of acquisition which are difficult to account for unless genetic transmission gives
the child a head start.
The correct sequence of True and False statements, according to Chomsky’s considerations
on language acquisition, from top to bottom, include:
( ) the short period of time within which a child achieves grammatical competence.
( ) the lack of correction or explicit teaching by adults.
( ) the ‘poverty of the stimulus’ available to the child in the form of natural speech
with its hesitations, false starts and syntactic errors.
( ) the fact that not all normally developing children acquire full competence,
regardless of differences in their intellectual capacity.