Poverty Of Stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the claim that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language without innate language-specific cognitive biases. Arguments from the poverty of the stimulus are used as evidence for universal grammar, the notion that at least some aspects of linguistic competence are innate. The term "poverty of the stimulus" was coined by Noam Chomsky in 1980. A variety of linguistic phenomena have been used to argue for universal grammar on the basis that children do not have sufficient evidence to acquire the phenomena using general (i.e., non-language-specific) cognition alone. Critics of the universal grammar hypothesis have proposed alternative models that suggest acquisition of these phenomena may be less difficult than has been previously claimed. The empirical and conceptual bases of poverty of the stimulus arguments are a topic of continuing debate in linguistics. ...
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