Abstract: . . .  psycholinguistics Page 1 PLINX204 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION – 2006 -1 The genetic basis for language acquisition: Overview 1. The ‘innateness hypothesis’ and its implications. a. Human infants versus kittens and computers b. Linguistic variety: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese ... Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu. Nature versus nurture. “... part of our linguistic knowledge is innate and part is learned ... [but] ‘innate’ and ‘learned’ are not technical scientific terms but belong to the pre-theoretical stage of investigation ... any property will be the result of an interaction between what was specified in the genome and what is in the environment”. (Smith, 2004:37). 2. Types of evidence : a. A priori evidence : Fodor’s (1975, 1980) ‘Language of thought’ infinite regress argument. "... to learn a . . .
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