Eric Heinz Lenneberg (1921 - 1975) was a linguist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology more generally about innateness. He was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. An ethnic Jew, he left Nazi Germany due to rising Nazi persecution. He initially fled to Brazil with his family and then to the United States where he attended the University of Chicago and Harvard University. A professor of psychology and nuerobiology, he taught at the Harvard Medical School , the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Cornell University and medical School. The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... Language acquisition is the process by which language develops in humans. ... Cognitive psychology is the psychological science that studies cognition, the mental processes that underlie behavior, including thinking, reasoning, decision making, and to some extent motivation and emotion. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ... National Socialism redirects here. ... Look up Persecution in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Psychology (Gk: psyche, soul or mind + logos, speech) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the human mind, brain, and behavior. ...

Lenneberg's 1964 paper "The Capacity of Language Acquisition" sets forth the seminal arguments picked up later by Noam Chomsky and popularized by Steven Pinker in his book, The Language Instinct. He presents four arguments for biological innateness of psychological capacities, as constructed in parallel to arguments in biology for the innateness of physical traits: Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (b. ... The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker, published in 1995, in which he argues the case for the belief that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. ...

1. Universal appearance of a trait at a single time across a species. "Species typical" traits.
2. Universal appearance across time for a group. Not just an artifact of cultural history. Again, "species typical" diagnostic feature.
3. No learning of the trait is possible.
4. Individual development of a trait rigidly follows a given schedule regardless of the particular experience of the organism.

Lenneberg died at the young age of 53. These early papers remain a significant legacy. In his publication Biological Foundations of Language he put forward the hypothesis for a critical period for language development; a topic which remains controversial and the subject of debate. A hypothesis is a suggested explanation of a phenomenon or reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena. ... Introduction In general, a critical period is a limited time in which an event can occur, usually to result in some kind of transformation. ...

Bibliography

• The Capacity of Language Acquisition in Fodor and Katz, 1964. Fodor, Jerry and Jerrold Katz, eds. 1964.
• The Structure of Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. The Fodor & Katz volume is a collection of papers around early Chomskyan linguistics, phonology, grammar, semantics.
• "Biological Foundations of Language" Authorized translation from English language edition published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1967 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.