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Welcome!

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Hello, KevinHipsman, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

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  • You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:50, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

POS phonology and semantics

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  • Laurence, S., & Margolis, E. (2001). The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument. British Journal For The Philosophy Of Science, 52(2), 217.[1]
    • I will use this article to get a general understanding of the Poverty of the Stimulus argument.
  • Lakusta, L., Spinelli, D., & Garcia, K. (2017). The relationship between pre-verbal event representations and semantic structures: The case of goal and source paths. Cognition, 164174-187. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.04.003[2]
    • I will use this article to get a general understanding of how children acquire different aspects of semantics
  • Gropen, Pinker, Hollander & Goldberg. (1992) Affectedness and direct objects: The role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of verb argument structure. Cognition, 41, 153-95 
  • Gropen et al (1989) The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alteration in English. Language, 65, 203-57. 


SOURCES FOR POVERTY OF STIMULUS

DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199573776.013.10 Gsoyoye (talk) 19:10, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

    • Tessier, A. (2016). Morpho-phonological Acquisition. Oxford Handbooks Online. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.013.7
    • Lidz, J. L., Snyder, W., & Pater, J. (2016). Introduction. Oxford Handbooks Online. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.013.1

Gsoyoye (talk) 20:51, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

LING 444 project

OUTLINE:

Definition (Maggi)

History (Maggi)

Phonology (Adam and Jonah)

Definition

Connection to PSA

Examples

Semantics (Gbemi)

Definition

Connection to PSA

Examples studies on showing poverty semantics in pos.

Rebuttal (opposite side) (Kevin)

(AF) Schoneberger, T. (2005). A Philosopher’s War on Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments: A Review of Fiona Cowie’s What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 21(1), 191–207.

"As a result of Saffran et al.'s study, as well as the works of others (e.g., Braine, 1971; Wanner & Gleitman, 1982; Maratos, 1982; Read & Schreiber, 1982; Sampson, 1989; Pullum, 1996), the author finds it plausible that children can learn syntactic categories by means of general learning mechanisms."

(KH) Laurence, S., & Margolis, E. (2001). The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument. British Journal For The Philosophy Of Science, 52(2), 217. Noam Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and the mind. Though widely endorsed by linguists, the argument has met with much resistance in philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophical critics have often failed to fully appreciate the power of the argument. In this paper, we provide a systematic presentation of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument, clarifying its structure, content, and evidential base. We defend the argument against a variety of philosophical criticisms, new and old, and argue that the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument continues to deserve its guiding role in the study of language and the mind. KevinHipsman (talk) 22:21, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(AF) Chomsky, Noam. (2012). Poverty of Stimulus: Unfinished Business. Studies in Chinese Linguistics Zwiseguy15 (talk) 22:23, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(MFC) Vallauri, E. (2004). The relation between mind and language: The innateness hypothesis and the poverty of the stimulus. The Linguistic Review, 21(3-4), 345-387.

This article tries to show some specifically linguistic weak points in the Poverty of-the-Stimulus Argument (PSA). Besides some quantitative considerations, from a qualitative point of view it is shown that the innatist tradition underestimates analogy as a resource for children to build their own grammars from the incomplete stimuli they receive from the environment; that knowledge and consciousness of reality surrounding the speech acts are also underestimated, and in fact play a major role in allowing children to build their internal grammars; that the role of “negative information”, conceived as the fact that some structures simply (but systematically) do not occur in the stimulus, is also underestimated.

Maggicurrier (talk) 22:21, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(MFC) Berwick, R., Pietroski, P., Yankama, B., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Poverty of the stimulus revisited. Cognitive Science, 35(7). <nowiki> A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect 'the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience' and that 'might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge' (). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various 'poverty of stimulus' (POS) arguments suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Maggicurrier (talk) 22:22, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(MFC) Lidz, J., & Waxman, S. (2004). Reaffirming the poverty of the stimulus argument: A reply to the replies. Cognition, 93(2), 157-165. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.02.001 <nowiki>What infants know about syntax but couldn’t have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. Cognition, 89, B65–B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner. Several commentaries have now been published questioning this finding. We defend the original finding by identifying both empirical and logical flaws in the critiques. Maggicurrier (talk) 22:22, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]


(GS)

Cowie, F. (2008, January 16). Innateness and Language. Retrieved October 13, 2017, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/ Gsoyoye (talk) 22:48, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]


William J. Idsardi, (2005). Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments in Phonology, 1-15.

Abstract: Recent discussions of Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument have focused on the empirical side of the argument to the exclusion of its conceptual and philosophical foundations in the general problem of induction (Hume, Goodman, etc.). Moreover, it has been claimed that there are no poverty of the stimulus arguments in phonology. Against these claims this article offers an example of a phonological poverty of the stimulus argument which is made stronger by its relation to Berwick's Subset Principle for language acquisition. The paucity of extant phonological arguments for the poverty of the stimulus is a historical accident. Such arguments can be constructed, as were done above for the 11 of 14 phonological environments “last” and “final”, and are perhaps more telling in some ways than syntactic arguments, as there is no possibility of semantic bootstrapping for phonological rules. The correct abstract axiomatization for phonological rules (an empirical question for science, see SPE) does real work in guiding the learning algorithm, and thus represents “knowledge unlearned and untaught”


Howard Lasnik and Jeffrey Lidz. (2017). The argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar, edited by Ian Roberts, 221-248. Oxford University Press.

This article explores what Noam Chomsky called ‘the argument from poverty of the stimulus’: the argument that our experience far underdetermines our knowledge and hence that our biological endowment is responsible for much of the derived state. It first frames the poverty of the stimulus argument either in terms of the set of sentences allowed by the grammar (its weak generative capacity) or the set of structures generated by the grammar (its strong generative capacity). It then considers the five steps to a poverty argument and goes on to discuss the possibility that children can learn via indirect negative evidence on the basis of Bayesian learning algorithms. It also examines structure dependence, polar interrogatives, and artificial phrase structure and concludes by explaining how Universal Grammar shapes the representation of all languages and enables learners to acquire the complex system of knowledge that undergirds the ability to produce and understand novel sentences. CONCL. The argument from the poverty of the stimulus remains one of the foundational cornerstones of generative linguistics. Because a grammatical theory must contribute to our understanding of how children come to have grammars (the ‘explanatory adequacy’ of Chomsky 1965), questions of learnability are intimately tied up with the proper formulation of the theory of syntax (see also chapter 11). Because of this central place in the theory, it is important to understand the argument for what it is. Learning a language requires internalizing a grammar (i.e., a system for representing sentences). The internalized grammars have properties which do not follow from facts about the distributions of words and their contexts of use. Nor do these properties follow from independently understood features of cognition. Consequently, the way to force grammars to have these properties as opposed to others is to impose some constraints on the hypotheses that learners consider as to how to organize their experience into a system of grammatical knowledge. The point of these arguments is not that there is no way of organizing or representing experience to get the facts to come out right. Rather, there must be something inside the learner which leads to that particular way of organizing experience. The puzzle is in defining what forces learners to organize their experience in a way that makes the right divisions. This organizing structure is what we typically refer to as Universal Grammar: the innate knowledge of language that (a) shapes the representation of all languages and (b) makes it possible for learners to acquire the complex system of knowledge that undergirds the ability to produce and understand novel sentences.

That said, it just as important to note that claims about the poverty of the stimulus and the existence of constraints on possible grammars do not eliminate the environment as a critical causal factor in the acquisition of a particular grammar. A complete theory of (p. 248) language development must show how the particular constraints of Universal Grammar (e.g., the necessary structure dependence of grammatical rules) makes it possible for learners to leverage their experience in the identification of a grammar for the language they are exposed to (see chapter 12). Positing a universal grammar constrains the learning mechanism to be a selective one, rather than instructive, in the sense that learning involves using the data in the exposure language to find the best fitting grammar of that language, subject to the constraints imposed by Universal Grammar (Fodor 1966; Pinker 1979; Lightfoot 1982; and chapter 11). Even if learners come fully loaded with innate knowledge about the range of abstract structures that are possibly utilized in language, they must still use evidence from the surface form of language to identify which particular abstract structures underlie any given sentence in the language to which they are exposed (Fodor 1966; Pinker 1979; Tomasello 2000; Viau and Lidz 2011; Lidz and Gagliardi 2015). But the fact that the input to children plays a causal role in the construction of a grammar does not undermine arguments from the poverty of the stimulus. Rather, the rich inferences that children make on the basis of partial and fragmentary data still provide strong arguments for the poverty of the stimulus and the contribution of innate principles of grammar in the acquisition of a language.

Gsoyoye (talk) 22:18, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Catherine T. Best, Gerald W. McRoberts, Rosemarie LaFleur, Jean Silver-Isenstadt, Divergent developmental patterns for infants' perception of two nonnative consonant contrasts, In Infant Behavior and Development, Volume 18, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 339-350, ISSN 0163-6383


Abstract: Young infants discriminate non-native and native consonant contrasts, yet 10-12 month olds discriminate most non-native contrasts poorly, like adults. However, English speaking adults and 6-14 month infants discriminate Zulu clicks, consistent with a model predicting that listeners who have a native phonology assimilate non-native consonants to native categories when possible, but hear Non-Assimilable (NA) consonants as nonspeech sounds (Best, McRoberts & Sithole, 1988). NA contrasts thus avoid language-specific effects and are discriminated, whereas consonants assimilated equally into a Single ,Category (SC) are discriminated poorly by listeners showing language-specific influences; other possible assimilation patterns show poor to excellent discrimination. This study directly compared discrimination of NA clicks and SC ejectives by 6-8 and 10-12 month olds with a conditioned fixation habituation procedure. Consistent with predictions, the younger group discriminated both non-native contrasts and a control English contrast, whereas the older group discriminated only the NA and English contrasts. Jonahcp (talk) 22:23, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]


Chomsky, N. (1980) On Cognitive Structures and their Development: A reply to Piaget. In M. Piatelli-Palmerini, ed. Language and Learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press.

Fodor, J.A. (1980) On the impossibility of acquiring more powerful structures. In M. Piatelli-Palmerini, ed. Language and Learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press.

Fodor, J.A. (1966) How to learn to talk: Some simple ways. in F. Smith and G.A. Miller (eds) The Genesis of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gillette, J. H. Gleitman, L. Gleitman & A. Lederer (1999) Human Simulations of Vocabulary Learning. Cognition, 73, 135-176.

Crain, Stephen. 1991. Language Acquisition in the Absence of Experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14.

Jackendoff, R. 1992. Word meanings and what it takes to learn them. Chapter 3 of Jackendoff 1992. Languages of the Mind. MIT Press.

Halle, M. 1978. Knowledge Unlearned and Untaught. in M. Halle, J. Bresnan & G Miller (eds)Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality. MIT Press.

(KH)Lakusta, L., Spinelli, D., & Garcia, K. (2017). The relationship between pre-verbal event representations and semantic structures: The case of goal and source paths. Cognition, 164174-187. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.04.003 We explored the nature of infants’ concepts for goal path and source path in motion events (e.g., the duck moved into the bowl/out of the bowl), specifically asking how infants’ representations could support the acquisition of the semantic roles of goal path and source path in language. The results showed that 14.5-month-old infants categorized goal paths across different motion events (moving to X, moving on Y), and they also categorized source paths if the source reference objects were highly salient (relatively large in size and colorful). Infants at 10 months also categorized goal paths, suggesting that the broad concept GOAL PATH precedes the acquisition of the relevant spatial terms (e.g., “to”, “onto”). These results are discussed in terms of the nature of goal and source path representations in infancy (e.g., whether they are represented at a general level – one that encompasses specific relations such as containment and support) as well as the possible mechanisms that may be involved in the mapping of these representations to language. KevinHipsman (talk) 22:21, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Rondal, J., & Cession, A. (1990). Input evidence regarding the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. Journal of Child Language, 17(3), 711-717. doi:10.1017/S0305000900010965

The input language addressed to 18 language-learning children (MLU 1.00–3.00) was analysed so as to assess the quality of the semantic syntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. The correspondence appears to be quite satisfactory with little variation from the lower to the higher MLUs. All the persons and things referred to in the corpora were labelled by the mothers using nouns. All the actions referred to were labelled using verbs. Most of the attributive information was conveyed by adjectives. Spatial information was expressed through the use of spatial prepositions. As to the functional categories, all agents of actions and causes of events were encoded as subjects of sentences. All patients, themes, sources, goals, locations, and instruments were encoded as objects of sentences (either direct or oblique). This good semantic-syntactic correspondence may make the child's construction of grammatical categories easier. Jonahcp (talk) 23:04, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]



Semantics (Gbemi)

Definition Semantics in general is about meanings. Semantic bootstrapping is making inferences of parts of a speech using the syntax of a sentence. “As far as we know, core semantics doesn’t pay any attention to order, it just pays attention to hierarchy.” (Chomsky, Noam, 2012) Wen Jan on innateness and Language points that the recent advances with semantics show that knowing a language is not merely a matter of associating words with concepts. It also crucially involves knowledge of how to put words together.

Cowie, F. (2008, January 16). Innateness and Language. Retrieved October 13, 2017, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/

Connection to PSA Learning a language requires internalizing a grammar, a system for representing sentences needs to be in effect for meanings to be inferred. The internalized grammars have properties which do not follow from facts about the distributions of words and their contexts of use and don’t follow from independently understood features of cognition. The way meanings are understood has to be with the help of constraints. Howard proposes a way to force grammars to have some properties and not others will be to use constraints. The point of the arguments is not that there is no way of organizing or representing experience to get the right meanings, but that there is something inside of learners that direct the path to organizing what meanings are. 

“ Consequently, the way to force grammars to have these properties as opposed to others is to impose some constraints on the hypotheses that learners consider as to how to organize their experience into a system of grammatical knowledge.”

Examples studies on showing semantics in pos. Semantic bootstrapping tasks. Wh movement, verb learnings. Gsoyoye (talk) 23:40, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Morris Halle in her paper on "Knowledge Unlearned and Untaught: what Speakers Know about Sounds of Their Language" talks about how speakers of a language know about the language without being taught like what sounds are likely to be together. Similarly, in the semantics of a language, word order matters. Gsoyoye (talk) 03:39, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  1. ^ "The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument.: EBSCOhost". web.a.ebscohost.com. Retrieved 2017-10-05.
  2. ^ Lakusta, Laura; Spinelli, Danielle; Garcia, Kathryn. "The relationship between pre-verbal event representations and semantic structures: The case of goal and source paths". Cognition. 164: 174–187. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.04.003.
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