Formal Principles of Language Acquisition

Wexler and Culicover ... address themselves not to the myriad data on the child's speech at various stages, but to a single, crucial all children succeed at acquiring a grammar for the language of their community, based on the information available in the sentences addressed to them....

"Wexler and Culicover ... address themselves not to the myriad data on the child's speech at various stages, but to a single, crucial datum: all children succeed at acquiring a grammar for the language of their community, based on the information available in the sentences addressed to them.... Formal Principles is a carefully reasoned book throughout, and Wexler and Culicover are under no illusions about the definitiveness of their results. Even putting aside its contributions toward the innateness debate, the explanation of linguistic universals, and the evaluation of psycholinguistic proposals, Formal Principles will stand as a pioneering work on a complex but rewarding subject, the study of which is still in its infancy, and as one of the outstanding achievements in cognitive science in the past decade."
- Steven Pinker, Journal of Mathematical Psychology