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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that There must be constraints on the learning mechanism used by children acquiring language.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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