b. 1939
Kenneth Wexler is a contemporary American cognitive scientist and linguist, best known for his work in developmental psycholinguistics and the formal theory of language acquisition. His research has focused on learnability theory, syntactic development in children, and the biological foundations of grammar.
Co-authored Formal Principles of Language Acquisition (1980) with Peter Culicover, a foundational text in learnability theory
Developed the Very Early Parameter Setting hypothesis in child language acquisition
Advanced formal models of the logical problem of language acquisition
Contributed to theories of Specific Language Impairment and atypical development
Longtime professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at MIT