This paper tries to show Chomsky's contributions to the area of psycholinguistics, more directly to explain first language acquisition, and less directly to raise questions regarding research in L2. Chomsky can be said to have contributed first by arguing against the current views on language learning, but also and mainly a) for his proposal of a theory of natural languages that accounts both for their invariant principles, but also for their crosslinguistic variation, and b) for showing that such theory is directly relevant to explain language acquisition problems, and more interesting than the behaviorist or constructionist views. The last part presents the theories about L2 acquisition derived from Chomsky's theories on language.
Chomsky; learning; second language