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Topic: Poverty of stimulus

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	Poverty of the stimulus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The poverty of the stimulus (POTS) argument is an argument in favour of linguistic nativism, which is the claim that humans are born with a specific adaptation for language that both funds and limits their competence to acquire specific types of natural languages over the course of their cognitive development and linguistic maturation.
		Though recognized as valid, the soundness of the poverty of stimulus argument is widely questioned.
		Pullum, Geoffrey K. Learnability, hyperlearning, and the poverty of the stimulus.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Poverty_of_stimulus (1665 words)

	Universal grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Later linguists who have influenced this theory include Noam Chomsky, Edward Sapir and Richard Montague, developing their version of the theory as they considered issues of the Argument from poverty of the stimulus to arise from the constructivist approach to linguistic theory.
		Poverty of the stimulus is the most widely-cited reason for universal grammar.
		The argument is that children are not exposed to enough examples of language to properly form grammatical sentences.
	en.wikipedia.org /?title=Universal_grammar (669 words)

	Perception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus.
		This (with reference to perception) is the claim that sensations are, by themselves, unable to provide a unique description of the world.
		Gibson rejected the assumption of a poverty of stimulus by rejecting the notion that perception is based in sensations.
	www.wikipedia.org /wiki/Human_perception (501 words)

	Language acquisition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Chomsky claims that without an innate ability for language, human infants would be incapable of learning such complete speech patterns in a natural human environment where complete sentences are the exception.
		This is sometimes mischaracterised as the poverty of the stimulus argument.
		In contrast, psychologist Catherine Snow at Harvard argues that children do not have to deduce the principles of language from impoverished and ungrammatical scraps of talk, but are presented with the evidence they need through parent-child interaction.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Language_learning (1647 words)

	Poverty of the Stimulus Argument (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		She claims that the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument 'fails abysmally on both empirical and conceptual grounds to support nativism about language learning' and consequently that it doesn't offer 'the least reason to think that there is a special faculty for language acquisition' (Cowie [1999], pp.
		The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is at the center of the case for nativist models of language.
		The a posteriori argument from the poverty of the stimulus (APS) takes as an example some specific rule of grammar and argues that the data to which the child is exposed during learningóthe 'primary linguistic data' (or 'pld')óare insufficient to enable a learner, endowed only with a general purpose learning ability, to infer that rule.
	www.shef.ac.uk /philosophy/staff/laurence/papers/POS.html (21579 words)

	Mixing Memory: Poverty of Stimulus in Ethics: Some Criticisms (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Kyle Swan has an interesting post on PEA Soup entitled "Poverty of the Moral Stimulus." In it, he presents the case for a "poverty of stimulus" argument in ethics that is similar to the one used in linguistics.
		The primary evidence for the poverty of stimulus in ethics seems to rest on Dwyer's and Swan's belief that the positive input is insufficient to account for the data, but neither presents a systematic study of this input.
		For that reason, I think ethicists who want to make poverty of stimulus arguments in their field would do well to familiarize themselves with the linguistics argument and the trials it has gone through over the past few decades.
	mixingmemory.blogspot.com /2004/10/poverty-of-stimulus-in-ethics-some.html (1492 words)

	NationMaster.com - Encyclopedia: Perception (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e.
		Information is a term with many meanings depending on context, but is as a rule closely related to such concepts as meaning, knowledge, instruction, communication, representation, and mental stimulus.
		In psychology, sensation is the first stage in the chain of biochemical and neurologic events that begins with the impinging of a stimulus upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ, which then leads to perception, the mental state that is reflected in statements like I see a uniformly blue...
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Perception (1951 words)

	Jon Cogburn's Philosophy of Mind Notes on Behaviorism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		From Chomsky's ``poverty of stimulus'' argument, discussed above and below, it follows that the usage children are exposed to is insufficient for determining a correct syntax.
		Here I argue that even if, moved by Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument as well as the importance of realizability issues in neuroscience, one jettisons classical behaviorism, one is not rationally constrained to deny that linguistic competence is just a practical ability.
		Therefore, Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument is no help in discerning a notion of tacit knowledge according to which linguistic competence can correctly be said to consist in such knowledge of a theory of meaning for the language.
	www.artsci.lsu.edu /phil/phil1/cogburn/currentcourses/4941/4941_1week2.htm (10542 words)

	Random Observations: The Rise and Fall of Noam Chomsky (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		it seems to me that calling it “poverty of stimulus” may just be a negative re-statement of the common observation that young children acquire language much better than adults in similar situations.
		In your world, the parent doesn't instruct the child, who exists in a "poverty of stimulus." As I see it, there are loads of stimuli happening, and the child is learning from that all the time.
		Poverty of Stimulus is somewhat confusing for me. This view is: even if a child is without language stimulus he/she will still acquire language from bits and pieces heard because of his innate inclincation for language (langauge acquisition device; chomsky).
	tim.2wgroup.com /blog/archives/000003.html (8536 words)

	SparkNotes: Language: Theories of Language Acquisition
		Chomsky called this the "poverty of the stimulus," by which he meant not that children receive very little linguistic input, which is untrue, but that no matter how much language children heard they could not learn it according to behavioristic rules.
		Even if children were to receive perfect feedback on their use of grammar--which is far from the actual case--it would be logically impossible for them to extract language's deep structure unless they were equipped with some innate constraints on what that structure could be.
		As a solution to the problem of the poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky suggested that each human child is equipped with a "language acquisition device" (LAD) that drives the child to acquire language and constrains the kinds of grammars that the child can learn.
	www.sparknotes.com /psychology/developmental/language/section2.rhtml (556 words)

	The Trigger Problem
		That a cognitive capacity is acquired in the face of a poverty of stimulus from the domain of the capacity is understood to militate decisively for the innate basis of the capacity.
		Indeed, such is the felt association between poverty of stimulus and innateness that Prinz, 2002, pp.193-4, suggests that ‘acquired under poverty of stimulus’ may serve as an operational definition of ‘innateness’.
		Similarly, it is a mistake to think of the poverty of stimulus considerations in favour of UG as an instance of the general (Humean/Goodmanian) inductive underdetermination of theory by evidence, as if the child were seeking to find justification for its ‘theory’.
	www.uea.ac.uk /~j108/facultydisputes.htm (12005 words)

	Language acquisition - InformationBlast
		These criticisms would be powerful against Chomsky's argument if the argument from the poverty of stimulus were indeed an argument from degenerate stimulus, but it is not.
		The argument from the poverty of stimulus is that there are principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone, however complete and grammatical that evidence is.
		This argument is not vulnerable to objection based on evidence from interaction studies such as Snow's.
	www.informationblast.com /Learning_foreign_languages.html (961 words)

	44 Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken--Reasons 5--8
		The totally untenable doctrine of "poverty of stimulus" advanced by these scriptures.
		It is clear that those who make such a claim have never even once seriously studied the behavior of infants or remotely bothered to consider what babies actually experience in their daily lives.
		These infants are, if anything, experiencing not a "poverty of stimulus" at all but an embarras de richesse of oral, audible, tactile, olfactory, digestive, excretive, and other stimuli.
	language.home.sprynet.com /chomdex/ee.htm (568 words)

	Universal Grammar and Linguistics
		The argument for this view, "the poverty of stimulus argument," is particularly important since it can be applied, as we will see later, to other domains than just grammar.
		There is a poverty of stimulus relative to the fantastically rich outcome.
		On the basis of logic regarding poverty of stimulus and of hard evidence regarding actual behavior of children, the I-linguists conclude that each child starts open to any language and acquires one particular one by setting a relatively limited number of parameters each on the basis of a few instances of relevant usage.
	www.zmag.org /ZMag/grammar.htm (4464 words)

	Ephilosopher :: Philosophy of Language Forum :: Noam Chomsky's theory (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		His view is probably a direct reaction to the views of Skinner (a behavioural Psychologist), whom believed that language was simply an extensive set of associations between words and things/ actions.
		The problem with Skinners theory was that in order for an infant to acquire language he/ she would have to experience a word stimulus- i.e.
		The problem is that the linguistic stimulus that infants/ children are exposed to is incomplete- this is what is known as PoS- which means that language cannot merely be a matter of imitation.
	www.ephilosopher.com /phpBB_14-action-viewtopic-topic-972.html (892 words)

	CNL--Florencia Reali
		She has also used corpus analysis methods in order to assess some basic assumptions of poverty of stimulus argument for language acquisition.
		Uncovering the richness of the stimulus: Structural dependence and indirect statistical evidence.
		Reali, F. and Christiansen, M.H. Reappraising Poverty of Stimulus Argument: A Corpus Analysis Approach.
	cnl.psych.cornell.edu /people/florencia.html (438 words)

	PEA Soup: Kyle Swan's Posts
		Recent attempts to revive the Platonic thesis that moral knowledge is innate have attempted to piggy-back on the perceived success of the Chomskian arguments for the thesis that linguistic knowledge is innate.
		The most important of these arguments has been the Poverty of the Stimulus argument.
		According to Fodor, “The bottom line of Poverty of Stimulus Arguments, as Chomsky uses them, is that innate domain specific information is normally recruited in first language acquisition” (Fodor 2001).
	peasoup.typepad.com /peasoup/kyle_swans_posts/index.html (830 words)

	Subject: [Corpora-List] The Language I D (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		understand, was not "poverty of stimulus", it was phonological.
		"poverty of stimulus"), but that learning led to certain
		I agree there are lots of good refutals of "poverty of stimulus" around.
	www.uib.no /mailman/public/corpora/2005-October/001701.html (343 words)

	Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Criticizes Bush Stimulus Plan
		In fact, the Bush Administration is headed toward the worst record for job growth in 58 years.
		Layoffs are epidemic, unemployment is rampant, growth is stagnant, stocks and savings have plummeted, poverty is on the rise, access to health care is declining, many of our schools are wanting, and there is no end in sight.
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	www.jessejacksonjr.org /issues/i0107036496.html (654 words)

	Economic Recovery That Unites Us, Not Divides Us
		We have crucial choices to make as we work to revive the economy in the face of Sept. 11, looming recession and a prolonged war on terrorism: We can rebuild the economy in a way that brings us closer together--or drives us apart.
		The latest economic stimulus plan offered by President Bush is neither fair nor effective.
		Last year, at the boom's height, the poverty rate among children in working families was higher than before the boom began.
	www.commondreams.org /views01/1018-08.htm (832 words)

	[No title]
		If much of language were innate, a built in part of the human brain, it would explain how so many different cultures have the same linguistic features.
		POVERTY OF STIMULUS Human languages are deeply complex, such that we don’t even have an account of English after all this time.
		So learning language can’t just be about being smart, but would seem to be a separate faculty Version 2: Poverty of Stimulus A series of examples does not in itself contain the information of what constitutes going on in the same way.
	www.csus.edu /indiv/n/nogalesp/PhilLanguageF05/Phil154Overheads/ArgumentsForInnatenessW.doc (383 words)

	Review of "W. Martin Davies's Experience and Content" by Dennis Lomas
		Because the stimulus does not contain conceptual information about the objects in view -- including that they are objects -- it is thought that at least some of our experience must be due to inferences from background information.
		Specifically, the inferences at issue have as the 'premises' transduced representations of proximal stimulus configurations, and as their 'conclusions' representations of the character and distribution of distal objects" (1983, p.
		Because Poverty of The Stimulus Arguments imply the inferential elaboration of perception and because inferences need premises, the first of these architectures is closed to the Cognivist.
	psyche.cs.monash.edu.au /v6/psyche-6-07-lomas.html (5132 words)

	The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument -- Laurence and Margolis 52 (2): 217 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of ...
		The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument -- Laurence and Margolis 52 (2): 217 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
		Noam Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is one of the
		of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument, clarifying its structure,
	bjps.oxfordjournals.org /cgi/content/abstract/52/2/217 (187 words)

	Deacon, Pinker, and Parsimony
		This is the essence of Noam Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" argument.
		Both feel compelled to respond to the formal version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, as originally stated in a mathematical learning theory paper by E. Mark Gold.
		Since most humans are competent far beyond what can be learned by simple induction (given the poverty of the stimulus) such appeals to model-based learning processes require statistical regularities that a biased learning process can exploit.
	keck.ucsf.edu /~caywood/language.html (2689 words)

	Larry Elder
		Clinton's program consisted of $16.3 billion in government programs, including money for summer jobs, the immunization of children, small business loans, expanded benefits for the long-term unemployed, additional money for meat inspections, funds for the upgrading of Amtrak, money for highway construction -- all to create 500,000 jobs in the coming year (1994).
		He never passed his $16.3 billion "stimulus" package.
		For the able-bodied, however, Tocqueville said, "There are, however, two incentives to work: the need to live, and the desire to improve the conditions of life...
	www.jewishworldreview.com /cols/elder100401.asp (769 words)

	"); NewWindow.document.write("IRINnews"); NewWindow.document.write("
		Faced with poverty and limited job skills, Alya is one of a many growing number of young women in the southern city of Osh, the country's second most populous, turning to prostitution as a means of sustaining herself.
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		IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
	www.irinnews.org /report.asp?ReportID=37821&SelectRegion=Central_Asia (1353 words)

	Language - for Elan's class (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		poverty of the stimulus argument: Chomsky argued against Behaviorism that language could not be learned because children produce novel utterances they could never have heard from their parents.
		And a 2 year old, if given a steel tray and a blue tray, will give you the steel one if you ask for the chromium one (because it’s the one he doesn’t know) and will remember at least that chromium is a color after a few weeks.
		Some of the most famous studies in psycholinguistics look at priming, in which a stimulus basically acts as a cue for retrieval either of itself or of another, somehow related, (semantically, phonologically, paired association) stimulus.
	ruccs.rutgers.edu /~elanbz/lang.html (5432 words)

	[No title]
		Pullum and Scholz claim that no one has produced a poverty of stimulus argument that successfully addresses all five of these points.
		Legate, Julie Anne and Yang, Charles D. Empirical re-assessments of stimulus poverty arguments.
		Learnability, hyperlearning, and the poverty of the stimulus.
	www.ku.edu /~pyersqr/Ling709/note2.htm (1516 words)

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