【正文】 n some cases the impoverished children tend to catch up quickly once their verbal environment is enriched, as is indicated in the case of Isabelle (Brown, 1958: 192), which implicates that it is too hush to make such an above mentioned conclusion as language is due to learning. Taking all the facts found in former studies and the two contradictory views into consideration, a more accurate conclusion may be reached that some type of natural or innate mechanism exists in human brain to make language acquisition possible while exposure to rich enough linguistic environment is necessary.3. ConclusionsThrough painstaking works, intense arguments and thorough speculations by philosophers, biologists, psychologists and linguists during the past thousands of years, the nature of language has been gradually revealed. Though it is still unclear what is exactly preprogrammed in human brain to facilitate them to acquire language, the results of numerous elaborate experiments on human physiological structure, persistent attempts to teach language to animals and close observations on children’s language acquisition, as displayed in the second part of this paper, have proved that a genetic basis must exist for humans to acquire, learn or use language, or in other words, language is innately preprogrammed. Meanwhile, careful nurture, or exposure to sufficient linguistic environment, is also a pulsory element to make language acquisition reach its full potential.Reference[1] Aitchisom, J. The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. [2] Braine, . The Acquisition of Language in Infant and Child, in . Reed (ed.) The Learning of Language. New York: AppletonCenturyCrofts. 1971[3] Brown, R. Words and Things. New York: Allen and Unwin. 1958[4]Chomsky, N. Language and Responsibility. Sussex: The Harvester Press. 1979[5] Gardner, . and Gardner, . Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee. Science, 1969[6] Hayes, C. The Ape in My House. New York: Harper. 1951[7] Lenneberg, . Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. 1967[8] Mackay, . et al. Relationship and Modules within Language Perception and Production: An Introduction, in A. Allport et al. Language Perception and Production, New York: Academic Press. 1987[9] Nelson, K. Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development. 1973[10] Sampson, G. Making Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1980[11] 張學(xué)忠，戴衛(wèi)平. 喬姆斯基的“語言內(nèi)在觀”. 廣西社會科學(xué). [12] 朱樂奇. 喬姆斯基的語言理論. 外國語言文學(xué)研究. (2)17 。Reflections on the Innateness of Language1. Introduction BackgroundWhether language is due to nature or due to learning has always been one of the most controversial issues for philosophers, anthropologists and linguists both in home and abroad for centuries. However, no generally received conclusions have ever been reached since this question was first proposed. In the middle of the 20th century, a breakthrough was made when Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most influential and meanwhile controversial linguist in the 20th century, elaborated his ideas on the nature of language in his review on B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. To the contrary of the view held by Skinner, who believes language is a set of habits gradually built up over the years, Chomsky argues that there must exist in human brain an innately built device of language acquisition, namely, the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Despite its extreme popularity in the field of linguistics throughout the world, Chomsky’s theory has aroused great controversy and been criticized a lot especially since 1990s. The opponents of Chomsky’s theory, following the tradition of Jean Piaget, hold the view that human is endowed wit