APA Dictionary of Psychology

the theory, mainly associated with Noam Chomsky, that language use differs from other cognitive tasks in qualitative ways and makes use of components that are specific to this purpose. The theory accords with Chomsky’s ideas of autonomous syntax and intuited grammaticality but is incompatible with the approaches taken in functional grammar, cognitive grammar, or behaviorist accounts of language (see verbal behavior). See also modularity; species specificity of language.