title: How Children Learn Their Mother Tongue: They Don't.
abstract: A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all saved in his extremely plastic and capacious brain, where it is stored in such a way as to organize it while populating it. The brain is thus transformed into a mind by language. Support for this theory is drawn from such topics as feral children and linguistic experiments with bonobos.
authors.affiliation: , Oakland, CA, USA. markhalpern@iname.com.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Halpern
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Brain development; Brain plasticity; Infant Language Acquisition Problem (ILAP); Theoretical linguistics; Universal Grammar (UG)