Chomsky's cognitive view of language

Chomsky's view of language, as presented by Moghaddam comes in direct opposition with the behaviourists' claims because he describes language in terms of a series of innate cognitive abilities that humans are born with (nativist view). Because humans have higher mental faculties than other creatures and are able to observe our own brains and behaviour, we have the ability to learn not only with a basis of environmental conditioning. Every human being, according to the linguistic knowledge of Chomsky and other experts, are born with the ability to build a mental lexicon (a series of words and corresponding meanings) and the ability to use techniques to create rules of language that are far too sophisticated to be learned through conditioning and stimulus-response methods alone. Such as abilities involving compounding words and suffixing- these abilities are learned also in the first language acquisition of children and is a gradual process. A great example of why the behaviourist model of learning is far too reductionist in terms of language acquisition would be the example of a 3 year old learning language for the first time. The accelerated rate and ability at which that child is learning words on a daily basis can only be explained by advanced brain plasticity at that early time of life for the adaptive reason that that human being will need a communicative process, so biologically it makes sense that humans are born with a higher brain plasticity rate. To try to explain this by reasoning that the child is learning at an advanced rate due to the conditioning learning methods of that child's parents or elders is seriously undermining the nature with which human beings acquire language.