ABSTRACT
It has been argued that acquiring language is “doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform” (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 29). All normal children acquire a language with amazing efficiency and without apparent effort or overt instruction. However, the data that children are exposed to are too impoverished to inductively derive a sophisticated system of grammar. A grammatical parameter setting approach to language acquisition, articulated by Chomsky (1975, 1981, 1986), argues that this can be accounted for only if it is assumed that children are richly endowed with initial hypotheses about the nature of the language. The initial hypotheses the children are born with, called Universal Grammar, are assumed to include a “system of principles, conditions and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages” (Chomsky, 1975, p. 29).
