Is the ability to learn language hardwired into children's brains?

Children's brains are a blank slate at birth

Question: Is the ability to learn language hardwired into children's brains?
Position1 of 2›: We have no innate language learning faculty
Argument: Children's brains are a blank slate at birth

According to this view posited by early linguists, philosophers, and behavioral psychologists, children are not born with any ingrained language knowledge.

The argument

On this account there is nothing linguistic in the brain a child is born with. Children are not born with any linguistic information; they start off with a completely blank slate onto which experiences, words and phrases are written. Everything that ends up there arrives from outside, through exposure to the language spoken around them and through reinforcement from the people speaking it. The mechanism is the one behaviorist psychology describes for any other act. Language is learned as a response to a stimulus: the child hears an utterance and produces something in return, and what happens next determines whether that production is repeated. The process begins in imitation — children attempt to copy what they hear, which is why they acquire the particular language spoken around them rather than any other — and is then shaped by feedback. A positive response encourages the use of an utterance; negative feedback discourages it. Across many such exchanges the utterances that meet with approval survive and the others fall away. What matters for the dispute about innateness is that this account needs nothing beyond the stimulus and the response. The rules of language do not have to be present in advance in order to be arrived at, because a child exposed to regular patterns and corrected when they depart from them will converge on those patterns without ever having been handed them. What looks from the outside like prior knowledge of grammar is the accumulated residue of thousands of attempts, some reinforced and some not. If language can be accounted for in the same terms as any other behaviour a child acquires, the postulated innate faculty is doing no explanatory work. The child's competence is accounted for by exposure, imitation and feedback, all of them external and observable. There is no need to posit a language-learning faculty hardwired into the brain, and on this view there is none.

Context

The blank slate, or tabula rasa, theory of child language acquisition stems originally from behavioralist psychology. This hypothesis was first posited by John Locke in 1690 and was popularized in the mid-20th century by B.F. Skinner.

Premises

[P1]Children are born with no innate linguistic information; their minds are a blank slate at birth. [P2] Language is acquired through behaviorist mechanisms — exposure, imitation, and reinforcement from the surrounding environment. [P3] These environmental processes are sufficient to explain how children come to master the rules of language. [C] Therefore, there is no innate language learning faculty — language is learned, not hardwired.

Counter-arguments

This theory does not offer enough of an explanation as to why children typically acquire language as easily and quickly as they do. Also, if they learned purely through reinforcement and environmental factors, then people would only understand and be able to say words and phrases that they had already heard, but this isn't the case. Both children and adults are able to produce new sentences to which they have never been exposed. Also, for many young children, language is not explicitly taught--at least, not in detail--and yet they learn it well all the same. In short, the blank slate theory cannot adequately account for the patterns in child language acquisition that researchers have documented for decades.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Imitation and reinforcement cannot account for productivity: children and adults routinely produce and understand sentences they have never encountered, which a mechanism that only reproduces heard input cannot deliver. [Rejecting P3] Even granting that environmental exposure contributes, it is not sufficient — the counter points to the speed and uniformity with which children acquire language, and to the fact that most children are never given explicit instruction in its rules yet arrive at them all the same, a pattern documented across decades of acquisition research.