The impact of generative linguistics on psychology: Language acquisition, a paradigm example.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]