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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
Pullum and Schulz talk about the argument of poverty of stimulus in relation to language acquisition and grammar. They challenge nativist linguists who claim that language cannot be innate and UG isn’t innate as well. Therefore we don’t learn language simply by exposure but by data driven ways. We may have an innate prime to learning language but mere exposure isn’t the only thing responsible for language acquisition. If we would actually have UG when we’re born that we would still learn language if we have poverty of stimulus. A child that doesn’t learn language during its critical learning period would still be able to learn if they have innate language acquisition skills.
ReplyDeleteI found this article to be a refreshing new take on the Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) argument. Although I have taken many linguistics and language acquisition classes, the argument made in this paper has never been addressed. I was particularly striken by the following section from the conclusion:
ReplyDelete“Although this article will no doubt be misread as a defense of ‘empiricism’, that is not an accurate characterization of it. We are agnostic at this point,” (page 39)
I have found that when discussing the POS in other classes, although the flaws of the theory are noted at times, they are quickly disregarded and not taken as strong enough proof to dismantle the theory. The argument of the current paper, which is simply ‘agnostic’ is novel and given the evidence described in the paper, it is more evidence-based than the widely accepted argument for the POS.
I think that in this article the authors are not properly distinguishing between OG and UG. They talk about linguists lacking the empirical work to support their claims, yet the whole idea behind poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar is there there is no examples of negative evidence. How are they supposed to get empirical data of negative evidence if there is no negative evidence in the first place? Also, they further conflate OG and UG when discussing their experiments of how children attain OG knowledge/rules. While it's interesting to know, learning how children attain OG knowledge/rules doesn’t get us any closer to understanding UG.
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