Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments

@inproceedings{Pullum2002EmpiricalAO,
  title={Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments},
  author={G. Pullum and B. Scholz},
  year={2002}
}
Abstract This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cannot be learning the language from mere exposure to language use. We analyze the components of… Expand
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Understanding stimulus poverty arguments
Abstract The argument from the poverty of the stimulus as Pullum and Scholz define it (their APS) is undeniably true, given that all language learners acquire the ability to generate more sentences… Expand
Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism
Abstract This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments” (Pullum and Scholz, this special volume, here-after EASPA). We first address… Expand
THE POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENT ONCE AGAIN
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The debate between empiricism and nativism goes back to the very beginning of philosophy. More recently, the nature of linguistic structure has been the focus of discussion in the field of… Expand
Nativism and the poverty of the stimulus: A demanding argument for the ‘innateness’ of language
This article critiques nativism about language (also called linguistic nativism), the view that language capacities are somehow innate, associated especially with Noam Chomsky (for example, 1980,… Expand
Nativism in Linguistics : Empirical and Theoretical Issues
The debate concerning linguistic nativism has been ongoing for years. For that reason, few have bothered to clarify the initial intricacies of the argument, to fully understand why it is being… Expand
Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
Abstract It is a fact that the child learner does not entertain logically possible but empirically impossible linguistic hypotheses, despite the absence of sufficient disconfirming evidence. While… Expand
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Existing research on how people learn language has significantly impacted the long-standing nature vs. nurture debate. Evidence for innate linguistic knowledge often derives from certain grammatical… Expand
The poverty of the Mayan stimulus*
  • C. Pye
  • Medicine, Psychology
  • Journal of Child Language
  • 2011
TLDR
The article demonstrates how POS arguments for individual languages lead to a reductio ad absurdum as POS arguments from genetically related languages are compared, and shows that universal principles of grammar cannot be established on the basis ofPOS arguments from a single language. Expand
Logical Structure of Linguistic eory
e object of inquiry in Linguistics is the human ability to acquire and use a natural language, and the goal of linguistic theory is an explicit characterization of that ability. Looking at the… Expand
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References

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TLDR
The argument underestimates the extent to which positive data can supply negative evidence and hence overestimates the intractability of language learning in the absence of a dedicated faculty, and indicates a need for domain-specific constraints. Expand
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Along with the increasing popularity of connectionist language models has come a number of provocative suggestions about the challenge these models present to Chomsky's arguments for nativism. The… Expand
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Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions--Plato's and Orwell's problem--Chomsky again demonstrates his… Expand
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Much of the recent discussion of language learnability has centered around the absence for the learner of negative evidence and the implications of that absence. The basic argument has been… Expand
Language acquisition in the absence of experience
A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is… Expand
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The rationalist-empiricist debate that preoccupied so many linguists, philosophers, and psychologists during the late sixties ran out of steam in the mid-seventies when both parties eventually tired… Expand
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According to a “selective” (as opposed to “instructive”) model of human language capacity, people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity (the… Expand
Structure dependence in grammar formation
Action NP's 26 24 2 Expletive NP's 41 36 5 Controls 41 38 3 TABLE 7. Frequency of correct and incorrect responses by sentence type. Returning to the results of the pretest, the first observation is… Expand
What's within? Nativism Reconsidered
This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind… Expand
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This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking… Expand
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