Introduction to Psychology
Psy101 People

Back to the chronology

Noam Chomsky

American linguist

Born 1928. Born in United States. Chronology section: Born 1920 to 1949.

Allied discipline: worked mainly in linguistics, not psychology.

Allied disciplineCognitionLearning

American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His generative grammar and his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior shaped how psychologists thought about language and learning.

Why this person matters

Chomsky argued that explaining language needs more than reinforcement and that speakers have internal grammatical capacities. His 1959 review is a standard citation in accounts of the shift from behaviourism to cognitive psychology, alongside work by many psychologists and linguists.

Main contributions

  1. Generative grammar

    Syntactic Structures (1957) is a landmark book in linguistics that helped reshape the study of language. Chomsky created or co-created the theory of generative grammar.

  2. Review of Verbal Behavior

    His 1959 review in Language (volume 35, pages 26 to 58) argued that Skinner's terms stimulus, response and reinforcement lose objective meaning when stretched over human language. He pointed to people understanding sentences they have never heard as evidence that internalised grammatical knowledge must be part of an account.

  3. Universal grammar

    Since the 1960s he has argued that some syntactic knowledge is innate, a proposal usually called universal grammar.

Context and limits

The review is a critique of one behaviourist account of language, not a test of all learning theory. Whether language knowledge is inborn remains debated, and the sources read do not cover usage-based and other criticisms, so they are not assessed here. This profile covers Chomsky's scholarly work only.

In your introductory course

Thinking, language and intelligence.Appears in the history of psychology (the cognitive revolution) and in the language-development section of cognition chapters, where universal grammar is compared with learning accounts.

Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 1.2. This is course context rather than a biographical source.

Years of active work

  1. 1955

    Completed his doctoral thesis on transformational analysis and began as an assistant professor at MIT.

  2. 1957

    Published Syntactic Structures.

  3. 1959

    Published his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language.

Sources