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    There must be constraints on the learning mechanism used ... — Carmelics
    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    There must be constraints on the learning mechanism used by children acquiring language.

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The primary linguistic data available to children is impoverished in the ways nativists claim.
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    • 2.Children know things about language structure for which no evidence is available in the data they are exposed to.
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    • 3.If children had to enumerate and test all possible grammatical hypotheses against the data, they could not acquire this knowledge given the impoverished input.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.The 'poverty of the stimulus' argument systematically underestimates the richness of statistical and distributional patterns available in child-directed speech.
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    • 2.Computational models trained on realistic child-directed corpora successfully acquire structure-dependent rules without innate grammatical constraints, as Pullum and Scholz demonstrate.
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    • 3.If empirical learning mechanisms suffice to explain acquisition, positing innate constraints violates parsimony and shifts the burden of proof to nativists.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The logical gap between impoverished input and linguistic knowledge can be closed by general-purpose cognitive mechanisms such as analogy, pattern extraction, and pragmatic inference.
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    • 2.Tomasello's usage-based account demonstrates that children acquire grammatical constructions through item-specific learning and social cognition, without invoking language-specific constraints.
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    • 3.A constraint on the learning mechanism is only necessitated if all domain-general alternatives are ruled out, which the poverty of the stimulus argument alone does not establish.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge

    Connections

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    Skepticism2 linked

    Related

    A constraint on the learning mechanism is only necessitated if all domain-genera...Children know things about language structure for which no evidence is available...Computational models trained on realistic child-directed corpora successfully ac...If children had to enumerate and test all possible grammatical hypotheses agains...
    +5 moreShow less
    If empirical learning mechanisms suffice to explain acquisition, positing innate...The 'poverty of the stimulus' argument systematically underestimates the richnes...The logical gap between impoverished input and linguistic knowledge can be close...The primary linguistic data available to children is impoverished in the ways na...Tomasello's usage-based account demonstrates that children acquire grammatical c...

    Similar

    The conception of language-relevant information available to children ...82%In the linguistic case, children develop language with little explicit...82%On Tomasello's view, children learn language without any inborn lingui...80%There are many ways to constrain learners' hypotheses about how their ...80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: innateness-language
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    Suppose that the primary linguistic data were impoverished in all the ways that nativists claim and suppose, too, that children know a bunch of things for which there is no evidence available — suppose, as Hornstein and Lightfoot (1981:9) put it, that “[p]eople attain knowledge of the structure of their language for which no evidence is available in the data to which they are exposed as children.” What follows from this is that there must be constraints on the learning mechanism: children d
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit