Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus

• Critically examines the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus - the theory 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
• Focuses on formal learnability properties of the class of natural languages, considered from the perspective of several learning theoretic models
• The only current book length study of arguments for the poverty of the stimulus which focuses on the computational learning theoretic aspects of the problem

Shalom Lappin is Professor of Computational Linguistics at King's College, London. He is editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); co-author, with Chris Fox, of Foundations of Intensional Semantics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) and, with Alexander Clark and Chris Fox, co-editor of The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).