Question on Language Development

[FoodisGood163]

I'm a little confused on a question from TPR. This was from one of their exams.

"According to Noam Chomsky, children learn all their vocabulary:"

A. solely from universal grammar
B. from a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors.
C. solely from environmental factors such as parents and teachers reading to them from an early age
D. from a genetic predisposition to good reading and vocabulary skills

I'm not sure if I'm understanding this correctly. So Chomsky is involved with the Nativist approach to language development (children are born with a "language acquisition device", they have universal grammar, etc.). I didn't pick A because it said "solely" (too extreme). I automatically crossed off B and C because Chomsky didn't have anything to do with the environment. I picked D and apparently that was the wrong answer.

TPR's answer was B: "Chomsky strongly believed that a complex interaction of genetics and environmental factors were involved in building children's vocabularies."

Do you guys agree with this reasoning? Just a little confused...

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[sc4s2cg]

Chomsky said that all of us are born with a LAD, which means all of us have the ability to understand the basics of grammar/tone at an early age. (genetic portion)

But he also said that we are not born with language, babies don't come out automatically talking English. Instead, we know the basics of grammar so we can pick up English, but we have to pick it up from our surroundings (environment portion).

D) isn't correct because Chomsky never said that children learned by reading, and AFAIK he didn't comment on whether some pick up languages easier than others. I crossed off D because of the reading bit.

Sidenote: by environment psychologists mean the surroundings, not the trees and stuff. So children learn from family talking, strangers talking, mom reading, radio, tv, etc. They are predisposed to learning the language via the LAD, but they still have to learn it from the people around them.