In addition to the input (no pun intended) from the "artificial intelligence" people, there was the input from a group of scientists in a variety of fields who thought of themselves as structuralists -- not allying themselves with Wundt, but interested in the structure of their various topics.  I'll call them neo-structuralists, just to keep them straight.  For example, there's Claude Levi-Strauss, the famous French anthropologist.  But the one everyone knows about is the linguist Noam Chomsky.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky.  He was father was a Hebrew scholar, and young Noam became so good that he was proof-reading his father’s manuscripts by the time he was in high school.  Noam was also passionate about politics, especially when it concerned the potential for a state of Israel.

He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, whereupon he married a fellow linguist, Carol Schatz.  They would go on to have three children.  He received his PhD in 1955, also from the U of Penn.

That same year, he started teaching at MIT and began his work on generative grammar.  Generative grammar was based on the question “how can we create new sentences which have never been spoken before?” How, in other words, do we get so creative, so generative?  While considering this questions, he familiarized himself with mathematical logic, the psychology of thought, and theories about thinking machines.  He found himself, on the other hand, very critical of traditional linguistics and behavioristic psychology.

In 1957, he published his first book, Syntactic Structures.  Besides introducing his generative grammar, he also introduced the idea of an innate ability to learn languages.  We have born into us a “universal grammar” ready to absorb the details of whatever language is presented to us at an early age.

His book spoke about surface structure and deep structure and the rules of transformation that governed the relations between them.  Surface structure is essentially language as we know it, particular languages with particular rules of phonetics and basic grammar.  Deep structure is more abstract, at the level of meanings and the universal grammar.

In the 1960’s, Chomsky became one of the most vocal critics of the Vietnam War, and wrote American Power and the New Mandarins, a critique of government decision making.  He is still at MIT today and continues to produce articles and books on linguistics -- and politics!