Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the controversial[1] argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. The claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information needed to develop a thorough understanding of the grammar of the language.[2]
The POS is often used as evidence for universal grammar. This is the idea that all languages conform to the same structural principles, which define the space of possible languages. Both poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar are terms that can be credited to Noam Chomsky, the main proponent of generative grammar. Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980. However, he had argued for the idea since his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.
^Shatz, Marilyn (2007). "On the development of the field of language development". In Hoff and Schatz (ed.). Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. Wiley. pp. 1–15. ISBN 9780470757833.
^Chomsky, N. (1980) On Cognitive Structures and their Development: A reply to Piaget. In M. Piattelli-Palmarini, ed. Language and Learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press.
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linguistics as a whole. These include innateness, modularity, thepovertyofthestimulus, language universals, binarity, etc. See for example, Connectionist...
deterioration. The politics around thestimulus were very contentious, with Republicans criticizing the size ofthestimulus. On the right, it spurred the Tea Party...
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the povertyofthestimulus). Distributional semantics favor the use of linear algebra as a computational tool and representational framework. The basic...
example, the claim that negative evidence is not available when children make grammatical errors, an assumption central to the "povertyofthestimulus" argument...