Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
@inproceedings{Pullum2002EmpiricalAO, title={Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments}, author={Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara C. 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…
518 Citations
Understanding stimulus poverty arguments
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- 2002
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…
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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…
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