Definition of bioprogram
plural bioprograms
linguistics
: a genetically programmed sense of grammatical structures and relationships that is postulated as an innate human capacity and that can be seen in similarities in the grammatical development of creoles
- And the grammatical rules that emerge, says Mr. [Derek] Bickerton, are remarkably constant from one creole language to the next. (This fact figured centrally in his hypothesis that every child is born with a bioprogram for language.
- —Robert Wright, New York Times Book, 23 Dec. 1990
- Studies of how children learn to speak support the idea that creoles reflect a linguistic bioprogram, for early-childhood language strongly resembles creole structures.
- —Sharon Begley, Newsweek, 15 Mar. 1982
- Is the judging of syntactic grammaticality in one's native language a uniform and universal ability, with such judgments referring directly to an innate bioprogram?
- —Anthony Diller, The Role of Theory in Language Description, 1993
