Who is the forerunner of Language Acquisition Device?

The idea of a Language Acquisition Device, often written LAD, can be attributed to Noam Chomsky, as a result of his nativist approach to the issue of language learning in general, and first language acquisition in children in particular. Chomsky proposed the Language Acquisition Device in the 1960s to address his critique of behaviorist explanations of how the environment drives language production in accordance to stimuli that come from their social context and are based on a process of repetition and operant learning to explain language production.

According to Chomsky, the environment can help trigger and develop this ability but the Language Acquisition Device itself would do most of the "work" involved in terms of creating a system ready to interpret and produce any utterance as long as its syntax can be defined according to linguistic criteria established independently from other elements and components inside an utterance including its real world significance if such exists at all.