Talk:Poverty of the stimulus
I removed the statement, `... Chomsky himself has never advocated an argument based on Gold's proof.'. This seems to conflict with "Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., and Fitch, W. T. (2002) The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science, 298:1569--1579." where they claim `... A version of the problem has been formalized by Gold ... No known “general learning mechanism” can acquire a natural language solely on the basis of positive or negative evidence, and the prospects for finding any such domain-independent device seem rather dim.' -- Cagri (talk) 13:07, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
I cleaned up this article a bit. I think the language flows a bit better now. Tyrell turing 19:34, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
JA: Yes, it does. Jon Awbrey 20:01, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Poverty of the Stimulus and negative evidence
I think we should try to keep a clear distinction between the POS argument and negative evidence. The stimulus is "poor" in a number of different respects (e.g. utterances may be misheard, may be spoken by non-native speakers, may be ungrammatical) and the lack of negative evidence is only one of these. Currently, the article implies that there is a single POS argument which crucially relies on the lack of negative evidence as a premise, but this is a bit misleading -- especially since the POS argument has only been set on in such an explicit deductive form by it's critics (e.g. Pullum & Scholz). If there are no objections I will be making some changes to the article to reflect these facts. Cadr 18:50, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
I think you should bring up those issues up in a subsection, something like, "Aleternative forms of the argument", rather than altering the main portion of the article. The reason is that although you're right that the poverty of stimulus argument has inspired discussion of other arguments about "impoverished" aspects of linguistic stimulus, the technical term "The Poverty of Stimulus Argument" does refer to a single argument, i.e. to the original argument surrounding learning from positive evidence. That's why people like Pullum & Scholtz concentrate on it. So, I think that it is important to leave the original argument as the main portion of the article. Nonetheless, I think that a subsection would be good, because there are indeed many variations that have spawned off from the original argument.Tyrell turing 18:56, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
- I basically agree with you, and a subsection sounds like a perfectly good compromise, but I'm not sure if it's so clear that there is an "original argument". I don't know when the term was first coined (if you do it would be very helpful if you could give a reference). Pullum & Scholz show that the term is understood very broadly; their narrow definition of a POS argument is simply given to make life easier for them (so they have 1 form of argument to challenge rather than 20). Cadr 23:14, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
- You know, I had thought that Chomsky originally focused on the negative evidence issue in his work because of what one old teacher taught me. But, after you brought it up I went and looked at some other articles on the issue and it appears that you are right, and there isn't really a single "original" argument. (Note to self: check references before editing...) However, for whatever weird historical reason the negative evidence issue appears to have garnered a lot of attention, not just from Pullum & Scholtz, but in my experience many critics in computational linguistics and developmental psychology bring it up (e.g. Reich 1970, Bohannon & Stanowicz, 1988, Developmental Psychology (24) 684-689, and Onnis et al, (2002) here: [1]). So, I now recognize that your first inclination was correct, and I was wrong about any "original" argument. But I would recommend a fairly solid section on the negative evidence issue because it has garnered a lot of discussion. Tyrell turing 23:07, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
- I agree with you that there has been a lot of focus on the negative evidence issue in the literature, and that this should be reflected in the article. The history of negative evidence seems to be quite interesting (and I wish I had a better first-hand knowledge of the relevant literature). According to Steven Pinker [2] the negative evidence issue was first raised in detail by an empiricist. Anyway, I'll make some (relatively minor) edits in the next few days to try to explain that there are various kinds of POS argument, while keeping negative evidence the focus of the article. (Of course, feel free to get in there first and make the changes yourself.) Cadr 23:46, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Added a response to Pullum and Scholz
I added Legate and Yang 2002 as an example of the responses to the article by Pullum and Scholz. I believe their response is representative and particularly interesting because it challenges Pullum and Scholz's central claim (this claim being the one that in all the cases they discuss, the data needed by the language learner is present in the input in a sufficient amount) by pointing out that the relevant data are, in fact, rare. (Actually, there is a huge discussion in the literature and these two papers stand for the two sides but are by no means the only ones, though they are representative of both sides of this particular debate. I think that the article might become too long by including more than the two though.) 151.197.65.44 (talk) 05:47, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
Gold's Theorem overapplied?
I've tagged "a proof by E. Mark Gold showed that any formal language which has hierarchical structure capable of infinite recursion is unlearnable from positive evidence alone" as not very well supported. From reading the K Johnson reference, it looks like Gold's work has been misinterpreted by some scholars of natural language acquisition; Johnson mentions Chomsky as disputing even the assumptions required for Gold's Theorem to apply to human language acquisition. Change "showed that" to "is often cited to support the claim that"? Then footnote this to show where GT has been cited? Johnson's paper has useful references for the latter. Yakushima (talk) 05:24, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
This statement "a proof by E. Mark Gold showed that any formal language which has hierarchical structure capable of infinite recursion is unlearnable from positive evidence alone" is completely false. Learnability in the Gold sense is a property of classes of languages rather than languages.
And hieracrhical structure has nothing to do with it -- presumable this means CF languages. For sure, the class of context free languages is not Identifiable in the limit, but there are classes of context free languages that are identifiable in the limit. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.167.221.3 (talk) 15:56, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
Infinite recursion: real or not?
The article now states:
"As for the argument based on Gold's proof, it's not clear that human languages are truly capable of infinite recursion. Clearly, no speaker can ever in fact produce a sentence with an infinite recursive structure, and in certain cases (for example, center embedding), people are unable to comprehend sentences with only a few levels of recursion."
This is missing the point (and referring to Chomsky's response on working memory only deals with the comprehension part of the issue). The fact that a speaker cannot produce an infinitely recursing sentence does not show the invalidity of the assumption about infinite recursion. In English it is always possible to add one more embedding:
(i) John said that he loves Mary (ii) Bill said that John said that he loves Mary (iii) etc.
The number of embeddings that a speaker of English can produce depends on the time (s)he is able to devote to this task without eating, sleeping, etc. The relevant point, however, is that there is no speaker of English who will say at some point (the n-th embedding) that adding another embedding suddenly makes the sentence ungrammatical. Recognizing this is crucial for evaluating the assumption that human language is infinitely recursive. Not accepting it means claiming that such long sentences are ungrammatical. Onc70 (talk) 13:15, 28 August 2008 (UTC)Onc70
- What is the evidence for the statement "there is no speaker of English who will say at some point..."? And, when you say "only deals with the comprehension part of the issue", what other parts of the issue are you implying exist? Unless you believe that the brain has the potential to process infinitely complex structures, then it seems to me that you have to concede that there is an upper bound on embedding. Gavril09 (talk) 04:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
God awful
Completely discounts the substantial linguistics studies undertaken by socionists. Representative of substantial ignorance in light of those studies. See the journals of the Socionics Institute, Kiev for more. Tcaudilllg (talk) 17:06, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
- Regardless of whether socionics is at all valid or not, it doesn't seem to have much at all to do with the topic. (For reference, socionics is a borderline-quackery method of personality typing, and hasn't got anything relevant to say about language acquisition.) Saltwater Rat (talk) 04:29, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
Unbalanced
From reading this article, one would get the impression that the poverty of the stimulus argument is highly controversial. Indeed it even says so right in the introduction! Maybe 30 years ago, but nowadays UG is undeniably dominant. This article should obviously have a criticism section, since a few critics still remain, but not one longer than the evidence section! LSD (talk) 01:09, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
- The argument is highliy controversial; nowadays surely more so than 10 or 20 years ago. Moreover, there are large geographical differences; UG has a very low level of support in Europe, as opposed to the US. Piramidon (talk) 14:34, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
- The claim that "UG is undeniably dominant" is false and part of the manufacturing of consent that pro-Chomsky linguists are constantly engaged in. The non-dominance of UG is explained by Newmeyer (2003, p. 683) who states that "my impression is that more linguists around the world do cognitive linguistics than do generative grammar." Newmeyer, who is very knowledgeable about the history of linguistics, includes the following types of researchers who do not use and support UG: functional linguists, some syntacticians working in the generative tradition (he lists Bresnan and Wasow), the great majority of psycholinguists, and the majority in the field of natural language processing. To Newmeyer's list, we can probably add most phoneticians, most sociolinguists, most anthropologists, and most language educators and applied linguists. Reference: Newmeyer, F. (2003). Grammar is grammar and usage is usage. Language, 79, 682-707. The following are other examples of the manufacturing of consent by pro-Chomsky linguists: at MIT and many other "generative" linguistics departments, syntax classes usually only discuss Chomskyan theory and do not cover any of the other 31 theories in the Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis; the theoretical literature review in doctoral theses about UG normally does not discuss any alternative theories; and many linguistics textbooks are covertly pro-UG and do not mention any other theories.Occa123 (talk) 03:16, 18 September 2009 (UTC)