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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Tomasello's theory contrasts strongly with the nativist approach.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.On Tomasello's view, children learn language without any inborn linguistic information.
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    • 2.The linguistic nativist holds that children possess inborn language-specific information.
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    • 3.Tomasello's innate endowment for language learning is not language-specific but consists of general perceptual and cognitive skills.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Tomasello grounds language acquisition in joint attention and intention-reading, which are domain-general sociocognitive capacities, not linguistic universals.
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    • 2.Chomsky's nativism posits a dedicated Language Acquisition Device with language-specific structural principles like Universal Grammar that have no analog in Tomasello's framework.
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    • 3.Two theories differ fundamentally when they disagree on the type, not merely degree, of innate endowment required—Tomasello and Chomsky disagree on exactly this point.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Tomasello's usage-based theory holds that grammatical structure emerges from pattern abstraction over token constructions, rejecting any innate syntactic skeleton.
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    • 2.Nativists like Pinker argue in 'The Language Instinct' that poverty-of-the-stimulus phenomena require pre-specified structural constraints unavailable in distributional input alone.
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    • 3.These competing explanatory commitments—emergent structure versus pre-specified structure—constitute a deep theoretical contrast, not a superficial terminological difference.
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