Suboptimist

i’m in ur acquisiton phaze impoverishing ur stimulus.

I am that end of having a cold where you feel okay for the most part. The only remnant of it is the 80 cubic feet of mucus in your head that makes you feel like you’re blowing your brain out when you blow your nose. Also, I hate doing group work.

Anyway, can anybody guess what I am summing up here? I’m too tired and lazy to type it myself, so I cut and pasted this from somewhere else.

· There are patterns in all natural languages (i.e. human languages) that cannot be learned by children using positive evidence alone. Positive evidence is the set of grammatical sentences the language learner has access to, that is, by observing the speech of others. Negative evidence, on the other hand, is the evidence available to the language learner about what is not grammatical. For instance, when a parent corrects a child’s speech, the child acquires negative evidence.

· Children are only ever presented with positive evidence for these particular patterns. For example, they only hear others speaking using sentences that are “right”, not those that are “wrong”.

· Children do learn the correct grammars for their native languages.

That’s right, it’s the age-old epistemological problem linguists face, poverty of the stimulus, claiming that Language is unlearnable for children given the lack of evidence presented to them during the acquisition phase, thus it is evidence for some kind of linguistic nativism.

The validity of the argument isn’t debated. The conclusions of it, however, are contested in some far reaching, dark, undiscovered corners of linguistics and cognitive science. Those who accept poverty of the stimulus as evidence of nativism cite human Language’s recursive nature. That is, a grammar can generate a sentence to infinity, and still be grammatical. Therefore, language is unlearnable. Evidence cited for the second premise is Subject-AUX inversion. Since I don’t feel like explaining what that is, let’s simplify/straw-man it and say that children only hear correct evidence of how to do it (”You can come to my house, Can you come to my house?”). The third piece of evidence cited is that children ultimately learn the correct grammar of their language.

I have problems with all of these. First, I don’t see how we can say language is truly recursive. I can say things like, “The cat is in on the couch, in the house, on the street, …” ad infinitum, but ultimately you wouldn’t be able to handle information. It is thus ungrammatical (or at least irrelevant to grammar). Chomsky would argue that this has to do with limited memory capacity in our brains to handle infinitely generated sentences. If this is the case, and with language being for communicative purposes, it’s still illogical to claim that infinitely recursive sentences are grammatical. Besides, when do children ever hear these? lolchomsky

The subject-AUX inversion claim, that children only ever hear the correct production of it, is also problematic. People makes slips of the tongue all the time. Children hear their parents make performance errors all the time, but they hear more correct forms. Stochastic learning, maybe?

Finally, children all learn a grammar, but we also know that each individual speaker of language X’s grammar is different from another’s. Okay, I’m actually tired of talking about this.

I other news, I’ve decided on my research project for phonetics: attention paid by non-Arabic speakers to vowels preceding pharyngeals. You know, seeing how well they pick up on contrast from transitions into following consonants. Also, I started playing the EVE Online. The world’s prettiest spreadsheet. Someday I will blog on that.