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Article: Poverty of the Stimulus, Logic and Syntax

Summary of contribution: Editing an article on "Poverty of the Stimulus" and what it contributes to the development of syntax in a child acquiring language. Syntax developed that cannot be explained without poverty of the stimulus. Children can't hear specific grammatical constructions, and yet without input saying what is right, when they hear it broken, they understand it as broken. Add examples from syntax and give a clearer overview of the logic of the argument.

(New) Introduction
Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) is the linguistic theory that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to learn language as fully and quickly as they do. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. It is supposed that the sentences children hear while in their period of learning a language do not have rich enough data for them to correctly achieve an adult grammar comparable to other speakers of their language.

The POS is closely entwined with the concept of universal grammar. This is the idea that there is a certain set of learnable grammars and rules that humans can acquire as well as the idea that there are certain rules that cannot be used in human language.

Both poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar are terms that can be accredited to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980, however he argued for the idea since 1965 in his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

"In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the argument that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. "

Summary
An argument from the poverty of the stimulus generally takes the following structure:
 * 1) Human children learn some grammatical knowledge of their native language.
 * 2) Speech input that children experience is ambiguous in that it can support numerous possible grammar structures regarding this knowledge.
 * 3) Input that children experience may or may not have evidence that distinguishes the right grammar structure from all the other possible structures.
 * 4) Children learn the right grammar structure without such evidence occurring in their input.
 * 5) Some intrinsic linguistic capacity is assumed to help children acquire language.

Innateness and Linguistic Nativism
Linguistic nativism is the theory that humans are born with some knowledge of language. One acquires a language not entirely through learning. According to Noam Chomsky, "The speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already a part of his or her conceptual apparatus." Chomsky's view that the human faculty of language is innate is also affirmed by Steven Pinker. One of the most significant arguments generative grammarians had for language nativism is the poverty of the stimulus argument. In this argument, Noam Chomsky put forth that the amount of input a child receives during language acquisition is insufficient to account for the linguistic output. To be exact, he said that, "the native speaker has acquired a grammar on the basis of very restricted and degenerate evidence". Similarly, in his paper, Pinker concludes that humans have a system that is more sophisticated than what they are being exposed to.

In their article, Pullum and Scholz summarised the properties of a child's environment. They identified properties of positivity, degeneracy, incompleteness and idiosyncrasy. Under positivity, they assert that children are only exposed to positive linguistic data. Moreover, there is lack in negative data that aids a child in identifying ungrammatical sentences that are unacceptable in the language. It is also claimed that children are unable to acquire a language with positive evidence alone. In addition, under degeneracy, it is stated that children are often exposed to linguistic data that are erroneous. This is supported by Zohari that states that in adult speech, erroneous utterances that include speech slips, ungrammatical sentences, incomplete sentences etc. are often observed. Furthermore, the linguistic data each child is exposed to is different (i.e. idiosyncrasy) and there are many utterances that a child might not have heard (i.e. incompleteness). However, despite the properties mentioned above, children would eventually be able to deliver a linguistic output that is similar to the target language within a relatively short amount of time. In contrast, when placed in certain environments, other organisms are unable to attain the language mastery humans have reached. From the nativists' point of view, all of these highlight that babies are hard-wired with a UG and thus support the innateness hypothesis.

However, it is important to note that the argument that the poverty of stimulus supports the innateness hypothesis remains very controversial. For example, in one of the latest work against the poverty of stimulus argument, Fiona Cowie wrote in her paper that the Poverty of Stimulus argument fails "on both empirical and conceptual grounds to support nativism".

History
Although Chomsky officially coined the "poverty of the stimulus" theory in 1980, the concept is directly linked to another Chomskyan approach named Plato's Problem. He outlined this philosophical approach in the first chapter of the "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" in 1965. Chomsky asserts that there is a physiological component in the brain that develops in children, and thus, they are able to acquire language universally. Plato's Problem traces back to "Meno", a Socratic Dialogue. In Meno, Socrates "undigs" mathematical knowledge of a servant who was never explicitly taught the geometry concepts. Plato's Problem directly parallels the idea of the innateness of language, universal grammar, and more specifically the poverty of the stimulus argument because Socrates discovered people's innate ability to fully understand foreign concepts that they are never exposed to. Chomsky illustrates that children are not exposed to all structures of language, yet they fully achieve the necessary linguistic knowledge at an early age.

Logic

 * Studies must be constructed in order to extrapolate information about negative evidence. How does "the red ball" and the "one" anaphor ("that one") show evidence of innateness? Logic of the experiments.
 * A community formed of deaf children without input of conventional sign or spoken languages is seen developing a home sign that makes use of complex grammar absent from input. Such formation of a language shared by a community is used as an example of how impoverished input suggests children's intrinsic linguistic capacities. Nicaraguan Sign Language is an example of a home sign developed by a deaf community.
 * Creole and pidgin languages have been used as examples of how languages are created without fully developed grammar in the input.
 * The overextension of a word is rare in child language learners. When children use a word, their application is not far off from the actual meaning of the word. In the event that they do use a word incorrectly, the usage is still close to the word’s meaning.

Examples
An overarching theme in examples provided as evidence for the poverty of the stimulus is that children learn to form language following certain rules, even though the speech that they hear is not comprehensive enough that they could have learned those rules from it. Children are not directly explained the grammar of their language, so if they cannot learn it from speech exposure, it must be innate to a certain degree.

Syntax
Children will not interpret sentences such as these in a way that violates Binding Theory. For example, they do not accept that in 2, 'He' and 'the Ninja Turtle' are the same character, even though they accept such an interpretation in 1. Children show this constraint even though there is insufficient evidence in the speech they hear for them to have learned Principle C of Binding Theory. That is, Principle C rules out certain interpretations of a sentence, such as the second example above, but since negative evidence (link to other groups page on negative evidence) does not exist in language acquisition, there is no way that children could have learned the contexts in which such an interpretation is impossible. Thus, it is suggested that this constraint is innate in the learning of syntax. In the above examples, the first sentence is being turned into a passive construction. Between 2 and 3, different noun phrases are moved to form the passive, either the smaller noun phrase 'the dog' or the larger phrase 'the dog's owner'. However, children are not explicitly told that 2 is possible while 3 is not. A poverty of the stimulus argument states that given the lack of negative evidence, children could not have learned that 3 alone is incorrect. Say a child is presented with two balls, one red, one blue. His parent might say to him: “Look! I have a red ball. Can you point to another one?" In this instance, it is not clear whether the parent wants the child to point towards another ball or another red ball. Anaphoric "one" is the ability in language for us to replace noun phrases with the word "one." However as can be seen from the following examples, "one" can be used to replace different sections of a noun phrase.
 * Binding theory - Principle C
 * 1) While he was dancing, the Ninja Turtle ate pizza.
 * 2) He ate pizza while the Ninja Turtle was dancing.
 * Passives
 * 1) I believe the dog's owner to be hungry.
 * 2) The dog's owner is believed to be hungry.
 * 3) The dog is believed's owner to be hungry
 * Anaphoric "One"
 * 1) The girl has a striped water bottle.
 * 2) Who else has one?
 * 3) Who else has a striped one?

In item 2., it is evident that "one" can refer to either "striped water bottle" or "water bottle." However most infants tend to show that they think it means "striped water bottle," replacing the entire noun phrase instead of just the noun itself. However there is not enough evidence within that sentence or other possible sentences to show the infant that "one" means "striped water bottle" and not "water bottle ." The speech that children produce is always dependent on a structure, even though the evidence that they see is not necessarily so. When syntactic movement occurs, the surface structure of the sentence is open to multiple interpretations which cannot be narrowed down by what children hear alone. They could theoretically choose to move certain words without taking into account the underlying grammar of the sentence, but even when making errors in production, they do not do so. This ability despite a lack of material from which it could be learned forms an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, and has been used as evidence that children are innately wired to build a hierarchical structure when learning language For example, the movement of question words from the verb with which they are associated, known as wh-movement, is restricted to certain syntactic structures. If the question word moved from a forbidden area, a syntactic island, the sentence will be ungrammatical, as in the second example below: This suggests that the grammaticality of the sentence is based on the it’s syntax. Since sufficient evidence for children to learn the structure does not exist, and yet they display a pattern reflecting that they know it, an argument from the poverty of the stimulus is formed.
 * Wh-Movement/Structural Dependence of language
 * 1) What did you claim that Jack bought?
 * 2) What did you make the claim that Jack bought?

Criticisms
There are some arguments that suggest the Poverty of the Stimulus argument, a nativist theory, is incomplete and lacks enough evidence to refute the empirical view that posits that language is learned primarily from external sources (as opposed to nativist internal innate hypotheses).[3] The empirical views suggest that language can be learned with mental processes originally meant for other modes of cognition. "Poverty of the Stimulus" is not a single hypothesis, but a number of hypotheses all supporting the nativist notion that there is something inherent about the language learning process.

Because it is a multifaceted hypothesis, there are many areas of criticism. Some argue that from a logical, academic standpoint, "absent evidence" (such as whatever is "innate") cannot be proven by the methods so far used in experiments showing evidence of "absent evidence."[22] Children have different statistical learning mechanisms that they seem to employ when learning a language. Furthermore, a computer simulation was composed to test if different computational models that were similar to human computation models were created and given common input that an infant would receive. The computer models were able to acquire different statistical information from the input alone. This suggests that the input that children receive is not as opaque as the Poverty of the Stimulus suggests, and thus children may be able to learn a language from input alone. This is shown when they are attempting to learn different aspects of semantics. The children observe a consistent pattern of a certain word referring to a certain object in order to learn the meanings of words. The also use similar processes in phonology by observing statistical patterns in speech in order to determine the phonemes of a particular language.Other areas of criticism range from discussions about what evidence or lack thereof belongs to a cognitive linguistic theory of learning or another cognitive or psychological phenomenon that isn't per se linked to linguistics.

Articles responding to each other

 * 1) Pullum & Scholz (2002) http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/bcscholz/Assessment.pdf [Garrett]
 * 2) Responding to above: Fodor, J and Crowther, C. “Understanding the stimulus poverty argument.” The Linguistic Review vol 18(1-2): 105-145. [Sarah]


 * 1) Regier & Gahl (2004) - Learning the unlearnable: the role of missing evidence (response to Lidz et all 2003, below)
 * 2) Lidz, J., Freedman, J., & Waxman, S. What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months, In Cognition, Volume 89, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 295-303, ISSN 0010-0277, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00116-1.[Dylan]

Revamping the article
Intro + premises

History [from existing article, perhaps beefed up]

Proposed evidence
 * Logical need for such an argument <--> rebuttals
 * Syntactic <--> rebuttals
 * [Phonological, from the Phonology+Semantics group]
 * [Semantic, from the Phonology+Semantics group]