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Poverty of the Stimulus

The Poverty of the Stimulus argues that language input is not transparent enough to support language acquisition, and a language-learner must have some sort of Universal Grammar to be able to make his or her own grammar. In this argument, the input is opaque; the underlying structure cannot be seen. Since language input is “opaque,” how can a baby create its own grammar? The Poverty of the Stimulus proposes that there is something innate, which allows language learners to create a fully formed grammar of a particular language.

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History

In 1980, Chomsky coined the term “Poverty of the Stimulus.” He defined as “knowledge that cannot be derived from the environment” (Thomas 52). His theory was influenced by early arguments for innateness by Socrates. Since the 1980’s, one notable study from Crain and Nakayama (1987), tested to see if children would produce ungrammatical structures, like *Is the man who __tall is in the room?, even when the input never suggests its ungrammaticality. As the theory becomes for refined, it has become more prominent in generative linguistics. (Add theories that came before POS).

Argument

Phonology

Phonology refers to the mental representations of speech sounds, both in production and perception. The Poverty of the Stimulus argues that humans are predisposed to be accepting of certain phonological rules and patterns. According to this theory, humans are born with a sense of which phonological rules and patterns are possible, and use that sense to make specific generalizations about the language input they receive, building their grammars accordingly. The Poverty of the Stimulus argument does not state that all phonological knowledge is innate, however, it does suggest that a large portion of theoretically possible generalizations have already been eliminated at birth.

In Bergelson-Idsardi (2008), people were tested to determine their acceptance of novel "words" with varying Consonant-Vowel stress patterns. English-speaking adults (tested through computer software) accepted more “words” whose stress patterns exist in non-English languages than they did of “words” whose stress patterns are not found in any human languages. Eighth-month-old children (tested via Head-Turn Preference procedure) were found to have the same preference. The distinctions between the two sets of "words" were arbitrary enough that the researchers concluded that human language acquisition mechanisms are "hardwired" to lead infants towards certain generalizations, supporting the argument for the Poverty of the Stimulus.

On the general subject of untaught knowledge, Halle (1978) points out that native speakers can identify and pronounce English words they've never seen before, and also that they can consistently apply rules to sounds that do not exist in English. Halle writes that English speakers are likely to be accepting of words like thole and flitch, while rejecting words like ptak and rtut, even though none of them are common enough to have been seen before. Halle also writes that English speakers consistently pluralize the German name Bach (pronounced /bax/) as /baxs/, despite not having any experience with the /x/ sound, which is nonexistent in English. Since there is "no indication" that speakers could have acquired this knowledge, Halle points to this being innate, unlearned, and untaught.

Semantics

Semantics, in general, is about meanings. However, knowing a language is not merely a matter of associating words with concepts; but also, knowing of how to put words together in a hierarchical structure (Wen Jan on Innateness and Language, Chomsky 2012). The Poverty of the Stimulus argues UG directs the organization of meanings, which then in turn help develop a grammar. Howard proposes that this is done with the use of semantic constraints as a way to force grammars to have some properties and not others. In talking about poverty of the stimulus and how the mind acquires and processes language, universal grammar comes up as an argument. linguists in the book, Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar talk about the innate knowledge of language as something that "makes it possible for learners to acquire the complex system of knowledge that undergirds the ability to produce and understand novel sentences." [oxford handbook] It is the constraints of Universal Grammar that makes it possible for learners to navigate their experiences in the identification of a grammar for the language they are exposed to. [oxford handbook] Cowie on innateness and language also talks about the importance of these constraints, the constraints in the universal grammar is what allows the understanding of a language. [Cowie, F. (2008, January 16)]

Gleitman in her work on "hard words", gives an explanation for the understanding of credal verbs (e.g., think and know), she explains that a "multiple-cue processing machinery" is what people use to people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear. [Gleitman, hard words] In understanding language learning, many studies lay out two or more hypothesis on how aspects of a language work, for most of these studies, nothing rules out one hypothesis against the other other than the universal grammar argument.

Other Arguments

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.

Research on Semantics with Evidence from POS

1. REDIRECT Syntactic bootstrapping

a well known method for word learning in the field of linguistics, is a method that heavily relies on universal grammar. [Landau & Gleitman, 1985] Infants as young as 17 months have been known to associate words with meanings, a child's experience of a scene paired with a sentence doesn't tell the child what one word in the sentence means. In studies with novel words like those conducted in [Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996)], children were able to make association using constraints on what subjects and objects are. Cross-linguistically, as well as an aspect of universal grammar, subjects of basic transitive clauses tend to name agents, and objects tend to name patients. Gleitman, in her study on how cridal verbs works, talks about the general problem of how children can't parse meanings solely on experience. In her study she tested participants ability to form sentences in a conversation between a child and a parent based on what they watched with no audio. The participants basically had to guess what the conversation between mother and child was. In the experiment, the participants were unable to accurately guess the conversation especially if it had to do with clidal verbs. This problem is a problem within the argument of poverty of the stimulus in problems about distinguishing modals, think, know, and want, this studies give evidence that information to acquire a language is not all out there. If it was just experience then there will be more than one way a child can acquire a language, since children get different forms of how a language is used.