If you are worried about a child’s speech and / or language, and you probably are or you wouldn’t be here, you quickly encounter a bewildering range of ideas and theories about linguistics and other angles on speech and language tberapy. Obviously, they can’t all be correct. Are they all equally suspect? Is theory just a distraction from the task of remediation? Or is there merit in a cautious evaluation?

My point of departure here is the linguistics which has emerged in the broad framework of what used to be known as ‘Transformational Generative Grammar’, TGG, originally due to Noam Chomsky, now known by many proponents as ‘Biolinguistics’. This framework depends crucially on observation, exact description, and introspection, as one way of looking into human minds. But against the tide of linguistics, neither TGG nor biolinguistics is commonly adopted in discussion of children’s speech and language. Commonly, in the discussion of children’s speech and language, there is a preference for much looser summations of the relevant considerations. From many of the perspectives critical of TGG/biolinguistics, introspective data are just not data. Biolinguistics is dismissed out of hand – if it is considered at all. There is, I believe, an unwisdom here. As an area of research, TGG/biolinguistics is growing faster than than the sum of its detractors.

Theories of all sorts have to be proposed with a degree of modesty, humility, and caution. I try to do so here. But I see no merit in not taking sides where there is a clear conflict, as there is between those who believe that linguistic structures are GENERATED and those who prefer to see language as BEHAVIOUR. As far as I am concerned, theories which seek to reduce language to behaviour just miss whatever it is that makes language the stuff of love, hope, legend, invention, science, comedy, and law. Without syntax at least, there would be no such thing as human society.

In my view, especially where children are involved, it is appropriate to be cautious and to take stock of the weight of the evidence. I try to do this in my proposal here which I have been working on since Nunes (2002). Plainly and rather obviously, speech and language have evolved as one of the distinguishing characters of the human species. By my proposal here, this evolution probably began some time before modern human ancestors diverged from Neanderthal ancestors about 650,000 years ago, involved at least seven steps, and was completed by aaround 135,000 years ago, according to Shigeru Miyagawa and others (2025). Each step must have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of years to disperse through the ancestral human population, contributing one by one to what most proponents of TGG or biolinguistics regard as ‘Universal Grammar’, or the linguistically specific aspects of the modern human genome. This applies no matter how much general cognition has contributed to the process.