Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus

Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus explores the question of how children acquire knowledge of their native language, one of the most difficult and long-standing problems in cognitive science. For the past fifty years linguistics and psychology have been dominated by the view that the linguistic input which children receive is insufficient to explain the rich and rapid development of their knowledge of their first language(s) through general learning mechanisms. This view holds that humans have a specialized, innate ability to learn language, which is species-specific. Clark and Lappin critically examine different forms of the argument from the poverty of the stimulus (APS) in connection with the architecture of the mind, the evolution of language, and formal models of learning. With cogent explanations of machine learning and computational complexity in learning, The book argues that if we make realistic assumptions about the way in which children actually learn their native language, then it is possible to explain this process largely through general methods of induction that extract structure and patterns from data across many different kinds of information. The authors, one a computational linguist and the other an expert in computational learning theory, have collaborated to produce a work that will surely spark further debate and research.