... children acquire language during the same time period in a certain order and for the fact that children can understand new sentences and formations of sentences without ever having had experience of them before. It is evident, however that there are many weaknesses with this theory; primarily that it is not a complete enough theory to explain the whole of language acquisition. It does notr explain why socially deprived and isolated children, for example geneie, have non-existant language skills. even when they were reintroduced into society, they failed to acquire much more than a very basic level of linguistic knowledge. If this theory was completely correct, then these deprived children would be able to acquire language in the normal way provided that the appropriate triggers were presented. Another theory which is in direct contrast to Chomsky's theory of innateness is the imitation theory by Skinner. This states that children acquire ...

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