Week 11 Poverty of Stimulus

Question 1

General data

Answer 1

Except for congenital defect or trauma we
all end up using (at least) a particular
language, although we might have ended
up using any other language.
Our brains, unlike those of other species,
are such as to enable us to acquire
language as such, although they are not
primed to acquire any particular
language.

Question 2

The acquisition of language is species specific.

Answer 2

Whatever distinguishes us from other
animals must be specific enough (not
necessarily specific to language) for us to
arrive at English or Italian or Navajo, etc.
It must also be general enough to target
any language with equal ease.

Question 3

Innateness

Answer 3

Humans possess innate equipment,
whether specific to language or not, that
enables them to acquire any language.
So far, then, we don’t have any argument
for the claim that the human child begins
with something specifically linguistic.
Some other, species specific, capacity
could do the job.

Question 4

The languages we speak are very different.

Answer 4

There might be universal features shared by all languages, but they are not apparent in the seemingly infinite variety of data to which children are exposed.
What else does the child have other than the data?
It seems that we are infinitely far from the explanatory ideal situation, i.e., the more languages there are, the more inclusive must be our initial capacity to represent language.

Question 5

Triviality.

Answer 5

That the child begins with innate equipment is true enough, but we seem to require something decidedly less trivial.
What the child’s innate equipment is required to actively constrains its ‘choices’ as to what is part of the language to be attained.
But no child is wired to target any particular language: the child can make the right ‘choices’ about any language with equal ease.

Question 6

Initial stage

Answer 6

The children must begin with ‘knowledge’
specific to language, i.e., the data to
which the child is exposed is ‘understood’
in terms of prior linguistic concepts as
opposed to general concepts of pattern or
frequency, say.
E.g.: children distinguish phonemes from
noises.

Question 7

Poverty of the stimulus

Answer 7

A child may acquire a language even though the data itself is too poor to determine the language: the child needs no evidence for much of the knowledge she brings to the learning situation.
Children acquire language from pidgin.
Roughly, children always make the right ‘hypotheses’ as a function of their genetic endowment.

Since the child can fixate on any language
in the face of a poverty of stimulus about
each language and since all languages are
equally acquirable, children all begin
with the same universal linguistic
knowledge.

Question 8

The poverty of the stimulus argument does not tell ua

Answer 8

1. What information is innate.
2. How the innate information is represented in the mind/brain.
3. Whether the information is available to a general learning mechanism or specific to a dedicated one (i.e. general intelligence or language module).
   These issues are to be decided by the normal scientific route of the testing and comparison of hypotheses.

Question 9

Positive data tells the child that some
construction is acceptable.

Negative data tells the child that some
construction is unacceptable.

Answer 9

There is much discussion of this
difference, for it has been claimed that
negative evidence is typically unavailable
and not used by the child even where it is
available.

Children are innately constrained to
initially ‘choose’ the smallest possible
language compatible with their
positive data.

Much of the debate around the Poverty of
the Stimulus Argument focuses on
negative evidence.
If there is lot of negative evidence there
are more chances that the child’s learning
is based on trial and error.

Even if there is plenty of negative data
(which is questionable), the Poverty of the
Stimulus Argument is not refuted.

The relative neutrality of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument suggests something surprising: the fact that the child can acquire any language without seemingly enough data to do so, indicates, counter-intuitively, that languages are not so different.

The innate ‘hypotheses’ the children employ must be universal, rather than language particular.
Imagine that each language is radically distinct, an effect of a myriad of contingent historical and social factors. This seems to be what the pursuit of descriptive adequacy tells us. Now, if this were the case, then the child’s data would still be poor.

But how would innate knowledge help
here?

Since, ex hypothesi, each language is as
distinct as can be, there is no generality
which might be encoded in the child’s
brain.

That is, the child would effectively have to
have separate innate specific knowledge
about each of the indefinite number of
languages it might acquire.

This is just to fall foul of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument: how does the child know that the language it is exposed to is a sample of grammar X as opposed to any of the other grammars?

Question 10

The best explanation.

Answer 10

The specific conjecture is that we all begin with universal grammar (UG), the one language, as it were.
UG is innate and is informed in the sense that it encodes certain options or parameters which are set by exposure to certain data.

To acquire a language is simply for the
values of UG’s parameters to be set in one
of a finite number of permutations (given
the acquisition of a lexicon.)
Chomsky understands UG to be the
initial state of the language faculty
(an abstractly specified system of the
brain.)

To acquire a language is to acquire a particular systematic mapping between sound and meaning.
How do we fixate on such a pairing?
Think of the language faculty as a genetically determined initial state prior to experience.
Experience triggers the setting of values along certain parameters that determine the output conditions.
Experience also provides the assignment of features in the lexicon, although not the features themselves.

Question 11

From the Initial State to I-Language

Answer 11

Different experiences set the parameters to different values (cf. switch analogy).

This finite variation ramifies to produce languages of seemingly infinite variety.

Once all parameters are set, the faculty attains a steady state we call an I-language.
I-language is a generative system which explains an individual’s competence with her idiolect.

Question 12

The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument
is not employed in direct defence of
UG (under some proprietary
specification).

Answer 12

On the contrary, UG is supported to the
extent that it is the best theory of the
knowledge which the Poverty of the

Stimulus Argument tells us exists.
UG is a scientific hypothesis.

Question 13

What must a child know such that it can correctly go from this kind of data to the correct interrogative form in general?

Answer 13

(1) a. That man is happy
b. Is that man happy?

(2) a. That man can sing
b. Can that man sing?

Chomsky asked this question as a challenge to Putnam, who had contended that the child need only have at her disposal general principles (not domain specific linguistic ones).

Question 14

The empiricist challenge.

Answer 14

SI: Go along a declarative until you
come to the first ‘is’ (or, ‘can’, etc.) and
move it to the front of the sentence.

SI is structure independent in that it
appeals merely to the morphology and
linear order of the declarative
sentence.

The important point here is that an
empiricist may happily appeal to SI as the
rule upon which the child fixates, for it
involves no linguistic concepts and so is
one at which a child may arrive without
the benefit of specific linguistic
knowledge.

Question 15

Now the child would proceed correctly
with SI so long as she continued to meet
such monoclausal constructions as

Answer 15

(1)+(2).

(1) a. That man is happy
b. Is that man happy?

(2) a. That man can sing
b. Can that man sing?

Question 16

But the rule does not generalise.

Answer 16

(3) a. That man who is blonde is happy
Application of SI would produce the
nonsensical

(3) b. * Is that man who blonde is
happy?

(3) c. [NP That man [CP who is blonde]]
is happy

It is unreasonable to assume that, for a
child to fixate on a rule R, it needs
exposure to all the distinct types of
constructions to which R applies, i.e., all
those construction types which would
refute potential prior hypotheses of ‘false’
rules.

Question 17

This is the gift of Plato’s point in the Meno.

Answer 17

There is nothing in particular being withheld from the slave boy, but he arrives at an understanding of Pythagoras’ theorem on the basis of data that would not be sufficient were he relying on just that data.
Hence, we conclude (non-demonstratively) that he has prior knowledge about the domain.

Question 18

The Rarity of Negative Evidence.

Answer 18

The kind of negative evidence putatively exploited by children is very weak; it only appears in mothers with young children.

Crucially, the relatively rich mother-child interaction observed is typical of the Western middle-class, but it is far from universal.

The fact that children acquire normal competence without negative evidence shows that the children who do have it do not need it.

Question 19

There is no need of negative evidence.

Answer 19

This is corroborated by the fact that there is no correlation between negative evidence supplied by an attentive mother and the rapid acquisition of mature competence.

So, (i) children don’t require negative evidence and (ii) even when they have it, they don’t use it.

This observation is also supported by a wealth of anecdotal data on the sheer recalcitrance of children’s errors.

Question 20

Children’s errors.

Answer 20

All the data we have indicate that children’s errors (morphological, semantic, syntactic) are quite rare, certainly rarer than they would be were the child seeking to falsify or test initial hypotheses.

Moreover, the errors made are neither random nor occur equally for all constructions. For example, usually, children (as well as adults, of course) make regularisation errors with the past tense affix -ed.

Question 21

Motherese and Empiricism.

Answer 21

It provides an initial framework from which the child may proceed to abstract statistically syntactic categories.

The unpopularity of the Motherese hypothesis has two principal sources:

1. Motherese is not a universal phenomenon: some cultures and communities either lack Motherese altogether - parents speak to their children with no peculiar prosody - or parents actually tend not to talk to their children much at all; even so, the children acquire their respective languages perfectly well.
2. Differential exposure to Motherese is not correlated
   with differential rates of language acquisition.
   Whatever Motherese is for, it does not appear to have a decisive role in language acquisition.
   Prosody, especially that of Motherese, might reflect word boundaries, but it is far from clear if phrasal boundaries are reflected (see e.g. Pinker).

In effect, then, what the child must be
able to do, if she is to progress from
words to phrases, is recognise that Daddy,
is the head of a subject NP, but this is
something that looks not to be either
phonetically or morphologically marked.

The child may analyse (parse) its input
stream, but to do so the child requires
some structural constraints (phrase
bracketings/parsing) specific to language
and there is no data to suggest that this is
encoded in the input.

Question 22

Semantic Bootstrapping: Abstraction vs. Innateness

Answer 22

Bootstrapping attempts to identify the language learning processes that enable children to learn about the structure of the target language.

Semantic bootstrapping refers to the hypothesis that children utilize conceptual knowledge to create grammatical categories when they are acquiring their mother tongue.

E.g.: categories like “type of object/person” maps directly onto the linguistic category “noun” while category like “action” onto “verb”, etc.

This helps children start on their way to acquiring part of speech.

Question 23

Moral:

Answer 23

Bootstrapping doesn’t seem to call into doubt the rationalist (anti-empiricist) claim that syntactic categories are not learned by abstraction.

The poverty of stimulus argument doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the falsity of empiricism.
It is not, though, a question of demonstration.

Like in any other science these are empirical and theoretical considerations.

Question 24

Rules

Answer 24

Are epiphenomena: they are neither formulated, nor represented, nor tested by the learner; nor are they theoretical postulates.

We can talk about rules, but only for taxonomic convenience.

It is thus simply false that Chomsky or others think of a given grammatical rule as crucial; it is a mere taxonomic effect, whose interpretation and explanation can be changed radically with the development of linguistics.

Question 25

Linguistics per se is not in the business of refuting empiricism.

Answer 25

Linguistics attempts to construct theories that, as in any other science, have universal scope, economy, and predictive success.

This is in itself independent of claims of nativism.