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Universal Grammar
The existence of Universal Grammar (UG) is a foundational thesis of most current research in generative linguistics and is strongly associated with the writings of Noam Chomsky, although it has historical antecedents as far back as the work of René Descartes and his followers in the 1600s. In contemporary research, UG refers to grammatical properties of human language that follow from innate, biological characteristics of the human species. The UG thesis makes predictions for, and draws considerable support from, the characteristics of language development in children.
The Nature of UG
The contemporary scientific view on cognitive capacities such as vision and auditory perception is that they have a strong basis in the human genome and in the mechanisms of neurodevelopment. In the case of vision, for example, ...
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