Although it's still too early to say for sure, four Israeli scientists may be at the fore of a new revolution in linguistics — or perhaps more accurately, a counterrevolution.

The original revolution goes back to the 1950s and is associated above all with the work of Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist whose theories have dominated his field for the last half-century...At the time Chomsky began his career, it was widely assumed by linguists that language was an entirely learned behavior like any other, acquired on the part of small children solely on the basis of listening and responding to the speech of adults. After several years of increasingly accurate trial-and-error attempts to emulate this speech, it was believed, their initial baby talk, despite its lesser vocabulary and intellectual complexity, reached an adult level of grammar and syntax.

Chomsky was the first 20th-century linguist to systematically challenge this point of view...No child, Chomsky held, can learn to speak in the same way, say, that he learns to swim or ride a bicycle, for the simple reason that, between the ages of 2 and 5, by which time most children are fully competent in their mother tongue, the number of bewilderingly complicated grammatical and syntactical rules that have to be mastered by a still immature mind is too great to be acquired by trial-and-error methods...

...Most of Chomsky's long career as a linguist has been devoted to trying to establish just what this innate grammar might be and to demonstrate that it is universal — that is, that it exists at a sufficiently high level of abstraction to account for the grammar of every language in the world. (In other words, it can't include a rule like "Adjectives always precede the nouns they modify," because while this is true of some languages, like English, it is untrue of others.)...

And yet despite his enormous influence, Chomsky has never been able to prove that any of these theories can satisfactorily account for the grammars of all spoken languages, or even of any single one of them...

Now, however, in an article published in the August 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and titled "Unsupervised Learning of Natural Languages," the Israelis Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, two of them physicists, one a computer scientist and one a psychologist, argue otherwise. They have, the four maintain, developed a mathematical model — or as they put it, "an unsupervised algorithm that discovers hierarchical structure in any sequence of data" — that explains how a child, unaided by an innate mental grammar of any kind, can learn languages as diverse as English and Chinese by precisely the trial-and-error method that Chomsky dismissed as insufficient. Moreover, this model, they write, has actually been tested on computers, which, when fed between 10,000 and 120,000 sentences in languages they originally were unfamiliar with — a not enormous quantity considering the number of sentences spoken to an average 3- or 4-year-old every day — were able to decode these languages' grammatical structure and to produce grammatically acceptable sentences in them...