Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus

Abstract

This highly readable but game-changing book shows to what extent the "poverty of the stimulus" argument stems from nothing more than poverty of the imagination. A must read for generative linguists.Ivan Sag, Stanford UniversityFor fifty years, the "poverty of the stimulus" has driven "nativist" linguistics. Clark and Lappin challenge the POS and develop a formal foundation for language learning. This brilliant book should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the most fundamental question in linguistics. Richard Sproat, Oregon Health and Science UniversityClark and Lappin provide a brilliant and wide-ranging re-examination of one of the most important questions in cognitive science: how much innate structure is required to support language acquisition. A remarkable achievement. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, University of WarwickThis comprehensive cutting-edge treatise on linguistic nativism skillfully untangles the human capacity to effortlessly learn languages, from claims that this capacity is specific to language.

The neurobiology of syntax: beyond string sets

“…two sources of information: (i) innate prior structure, which is likely to be of a pre-linguistic, non-language specific type and, to some presumably limited extent, language-specific; and (ii) the environment, both the linguistic and extra-linguistic experience. Thus, the underlying conceptualization is similar to that of Chomsky [15,116] and other classical models of acquisition [40,100,104,117], although the formulation in terms of a spiking recurrent network is clearly more natural to neurobiology [109,118]. Finally, we note that a suitable reinterpretation of equation (8.2), and added in as an analogous equation (8.3), 10 would serve as a model for an online processing memory (beyond the memory capture by pure state-dependent effects).…”

“…On independent grounds, based on considerations of the evolutionary origins of the language faculty, Jackendoff argues ( [37], p. 616) that 'what is called for is a hierarchy (or lattice) of grammars-not the familiar Chomsky hierarchy, which involves uninterpreted formal languages, but rather a hierarchy of formal systems that map between sound and meaning'. Finally, Clark & Lappin ( [40], p. 94) emphasize that 'the traditional classes of the Chomsky hierarchy are defined with reference to simple machine models, but we have no grounds for thinking that the human brain operates with these particular models. It is reasonable to expect that a deeper understanding of the nature of neural computation will yield new computational paradigms and corresponding classes of languages'.…”

“…7 We use Gold's paradigm as an explicit example of learning theoretic results because it is relatively simple and well-understood, not because it is necessarily a realistic model of language acquisition. For instance, it is possible to ease the acquisition problem by assuming that the child's (language) environment can be modelled appropriately as a structured stochastic input source ( [40] for an extensive discussion). 8 It is possible to implicitly represent an infinite class of grammars by finite means via, for example, Gödel enumeration ( [79], ch.…”

Linguistic diversityand universals

“…With regard to (i), for example, it has for a long time been taken as a given that grammars are learnable only if we assume a rich set of absolute universals that are innate (e.g., Chomsky 1965Chomsky , 1980. This has been challenged by empirical research on how children actually acquire language (Tomasello 2003) and by computational learnability theory (Clark andLappin 2011, Perfors et al 2011). Both suggest that innate universals of grammar are not needed for learnability (because children apply powerful probabilistic learning strategies).…”

Computational Learning Theory and Language Acquisition

“…2 In this chapter we are concerned with the APS as a problem in formal learning theory, and we adopt the computational formulation of this argument given in Clark & Lappin (2010b).…”