Talk:Poverty of the stimulus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)