Children learn grammar rules they were never actually taught

Children reliably produce and understand sentence structures they've never heard modeled and are rarely corrected into using, despite the messy, error-filled speech they actually hear. Noam Chomsky used this mismatch — the 'poverty of the stimulus' — to argue that humans are born with an innate grammatical scaffold shared across all languages, rather than learning grammar purely through imitation.

— Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax — MIT Press, 1965
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