language is initially acquired or that it develops.
He develops his own argument by citing what he calls the traditional and popular view about how children acquire language is that they imitate other speakers, who correct their errors. He disagrees, saying that the conventions of communication are inferred from what people say and write but are also known a priori. This suggests that they are confirmed but not really determined by the wash of experience.
According to Chomsky's view, then, children can (even though they do not always) discover meaning without ever having been "taught" what meaning is. There is a deep structure or function to linguistic knowledge that precedes manifest structure or talking. Thus they have learned meaning inductively, not imitatively; they have never consciously "tried" to learn meanings for purposes of communication. For Chomsky, language is by and large a process of abstracting from experience. Thus linguistic knowledge can be molded but not really initiated from the outside because that knowledge is already operating in the child. In other words, there is an internal grammar embedded into the rational processes of the (human) child. The rational capacity of the child is what really develops, and the language is a manifestation of that capacity.
This view is supported by other commentators as well, although the argument varies slightly depending on the source. The idea of linguistic knowledge as a process of abstracting is connected to the work of Piaget. But whereas Chomsky focuses purely on the psychological, Piaget says that language is acquired because the child abstracts from Physical development of the brain and motor functions. For Piaget, physiology is a critical component of the process. This concept puts the source of cognitive/communicative functions of the individual, including language use, in biology rather than rationality, and his problem becomes how to explain th...