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Skinner was used to dealing with lab rats, but pressing a pellet for food is no analogy for producing language. In order to speak, people use great creativity while obeying many complicated rules.
    Chomsky argued: “A typical example of stimulus control for Skinner would be the response to a piece of music with the utterance Mozart or to a painting with the response Dutch . These responses are asserted to be ‘under the control of extremely subtle properties’ of the physical object or event.” But, argued Chomsky, what if we don’t say “ Dutch ”? What if we say, “ Clashes with the wallpaper , I thought you liked abstract work , Never saw it before , Tilted , Hanging too low , Beautiful , Hideous , Remember our camping trip last summer? or whatever else might come into our minds when looking at a picture”? People are not controlled by some unknown aspect of a painting, he said. Their response comes from inside them and is facilitated by the infinite creativity of language. 11
    The key idea in Skinner’s behaviorism—if you push someone or something in the right way, it will respond in a predictable manner—was called stimulus-response. But when it comes to language, Chomsky said, particularly when children learn language for the first time, stimulus-response is not a relevant model. What is fundamentally interesting about language is the incredible speed with which children learn thousands and thousands of words and the many rules that combine them. In fact, there just isn’t enough information in the language children hear in their day-to-day lives for them to divine all the rules that they come to know how to use. Chomsky called this phenomenon “poverty of stimulus.” So how do children learn how to speak if language is so incredibly complicated? They must come to the task somehow prepared, he concluded. They must be born with a mental component that helps them learn language.
    It was as if Chomsky had delivered unto Skinner and behaviorism a knockout punch. 12 The review garnered enormous amounts of attention from people in all sorts of disciplines. For many academics, this was the moment at which Chomsky seized their attention and would hold them riveted from then on.
    The young professor was propelled into the limelight, and even though his review was widely criticized as glib, biting, and angry, it was these very qualities that seemed to thrill people. As much a polemic as a review, the article was described as “devastating,” “electric,” and a superb job of “constructive destruction.” Chomsky the linguistic freedom fighter was born. 13
    Skinner responded that Chomsky hadn’t understood what he was saying, that in some respects it seemed that Chomsky had intentionally misinterpreted him, but the damage was done. From that point on, the obvious influence of behaviorism seemed to fade.
    It took a few years for the impact of Chomsky’s first book to be felt, but by 1964 Charles Hockett, one of the most eminent linguists of the time, described Syntactic Structures as among the field’s few “major breakthroughs.” 14 Howard Maclay wrote: “The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957 can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live through this upheaval.” 15 Ray Jackendoff remembers that in 1965, when he began his graduate studies (with Chomsky), “generative linguistics was the toast of the intellectual world.” 16 Daniel Dennett, the well-known philosophy professor at Tufts, wrote in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that he could “vividly remember the shockwave that rolled through philosophy when Chomsky’s work first came to our attention.” 17 Looking back, Chris Knight of the University of East London wrote that Chomsky may as well have thrown a bomb. 18
    In less than a decade, people were proclaiming a psycholinguistic revolution. 19 Many young scholars flocked to MIT to work with Chomsky on his new generative