Look, what you say is roughly my point of view, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but you didn't actually respond to the article, but rather to some st

Look, what you say is roughly my point of view, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but you didn't actually respond to the article, but rather to some straw-man representation of "the Chomsky nonsense", to use your words. I'll try to elaborate the claims in the article a bit (and I'm probably overly simplifying it): when you have a sentence like "I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one", one can ask whether "one" refers to "ball" or "red ball". The sentence doesn't give you information as to which option is true. But, say there are two kids, Chris, playing with a red ball and Max, playing with a blue ball, and someone says "Chris has a red ball but Max doesn’t have one." In that case, they can learn that 'one' refers to 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their argument is that for a language learner (read: baby) to learn correct grammar, he has to encounter such situations, and yet, such situations are rarer than the rate of grammatical errors in similar uses of the word 'one' is higher than the rate of occurrence of scenarios where you could learn the distinction (this is not an assertion, it's backed by analysis of corpora of parents talking to their babies). And yet, their experiments show in a somewhat roundabout manner that the babies treat 'one' as referring the 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their conclusion is that this means that out of the space of possible grammars, babies didn't consider the ones where 'one' refers to 'ball' and not 'red ball' - there's an innate preference towards those. While I can poke some holes in the argument (mostly because of the implied assumption that the mental representation of grammar is in a generative grammar), your response read too much like http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/