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… 
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518 Citations

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…
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…
THE POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENT ONCE AGAIN
The best-known argument in favor of the innatism of certain mental structures is still the ‘Poverty of the Stimulus Argument’ (PoSA). The general idea of the PoSA is that the knowledge which needs to…
Reappraising Poverty of Stimulus Argument : A Corpus Analysis Approach
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Reassessing the Poverty of the Stimulus
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…
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
The 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…
Little Red Riding Hood and the Chomskyan Wolf: A debate on Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments
The present article discusses the empirical validity of the so-called poverty of the stimulus argument within nativist accounts of first language acquisition. Arguments against nativism in early…
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