of general cognitive development and Vygotsky's social theories that attribute the development of language to an individual's social interactions and growth. Biological preconditions Evolutionary biologists are skeptical of the claim that syntactic knowledge is transmitted in the human genome. However, many researchers claim that the ability to acquire such a complicated system is unique to the human species. Non-biologists also tend to believe that our ability to learn spoken language may have been developed through the evolutionary process and that the foundation for language may be passed down genetically. The ability to speak and understand human language requires speech production skills and abilities as well as multisensory integration of sensory processing abilities. Scientists have conducted extensive research to see if other animal species are capable of learning a complex human language. Several studies have worked with great apes, owing to their close evolutionary relationship to humans. In the documentary Project Nim, for example, researcher Herbert S. Terrace conducted the study to nurture a young chimpanzee with intimate human interaction. The researchers trained the chimp American Sign Language and treated it like a human child. Finally, the chimp was able to learn over 114 signs in order to communicate his wants to the caregivers. Unlike humans, however, Nim was unable to make use of significant grammar or context. Other attempts to teach great apes language have met with varying degrees of success, and whether the communication the apes achieve can be equated to human language is controversial. One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes capacities specific to language acquisition, often referred to as universal grammar. For fifty years, linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning. In particular, he has proposed that humans are biologically prewired to learn language at a certain time and in a certain way, arguing that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD). However, since he developed the minimalist program, his latest version of theory of syntactic structure, Chomsky has reduced the elements of universal grammar, which he believes are prewired in humans to just the principle of recursion, thus voiding most of the nativist endeavor. Researchers who believe that grammar is learned rather than innate, have hypothesized that language learning results from general cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their human interactants. Based on studies of the