POVERTY OF STIMULUS ARGUMENTS AND BEHAVIOURISM

CHOMSKY AND QUINE ON LANGUAGE LEARNINGWhen it comes to the details of how children learn their first language there is a substantive difference between Chomsky and Quine. The primary difference between them centers on the role that they think reinforcement and punishment plays in a child learning his first language. The Quinean picture of a child learning his first language involves the child using his innate babbling instinct as he mouths various different words. Parents and others reinforce and punish these emittings until they shape the child's pattern of verbal behavior into the external shape of that child's social environment. As Quine put it in Word and Object (1960):People growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike (1960, p. 8)Linguistic nativist Chomsky disagrees with this Quinean picture. He thinks that the outward shape of language results not from the child's faltering attempts at speech being corrected by his peers, but from the child using his innate universal grammar to structure the data of experience, which the child contingently encounters.The issue between Chomsky and Quine on this point is a purely empirical one. In the last twenty years much detailed evidence has emerged which can be used to decide between the two theorists. The central idea around which nativism was built has been poverty of stimulus arguments (PSA; Chomsky 1975, Pinker 1994, Boeckx 2006). Chomsky (1975) has argued that children display knowledge of language, and that this knowledge is not provided by the environment, and therefore it must be innate. Typically Chomsky uses the subject-auxiliary inversion rule to illustrate how PSA work (Chomsky, 1971; 1972; 1975; 1986; 1988). In their paper "Empirical Assessment of Stimulus Poverty Arguments", Geoffrey Pullum and Barbara Scholz (2002a) call the subject-auxiliary inversion rule the paradigm case, which nativists use to illustrate poverty of stimulus arguments. They cite eight different occasions that Chomsky uses the example (1965, p. 55-56; 1968, pp. 51-52; 1971, pp. 2933; 1972, pp. 30-33; 1975, pp. 153-154; 1986, pp. 7-8; 1988, pp. 41-47). They also cite other Chomskian thinkers, including linguists such as Lightfoot, (1991, pp. 2-4); Uriagereka, (1998, pp. 9-10); Carstairs-McCarthy, (1999, pp. 4-5); Smith, (1999, pp. 53-54); Lasnik, (2000, pp. 6-9) as well as psychologists such as Crain, (1991, p. 602); Marcus, (1993, p. 80); Pinker, (1994, pp. 40-42; 233-234) who here endorsed the claim. They argue that this supposed instance of a PSA is being passed around and repeated over and over again. In this paper, I examine whether the PSA argument (as applied to syntactic knowledge) actually works. I will discuss how, if sound, the PSA affects Quine's view of language learning. It will be shown how Quine's theories on language acquisition will be affected if the PSA turns out to be false.Pullum and Scholz (2002a) show that poverty of stimulus arguments are used in a variety of not always consistent ways in the literature. Having surveyed some of the literature on the PSA, they isolate what they believe to be the strongest version of the argument. The argument they construct is as follows:(A) Human infants learn their first languages either by data-driven learning or by innately-primed learning. (B) If human infants acquire their first languages via data-driven learning, then they can never learn anything for which they lack crucial evidence. (C) But infants do in fact learn things for which they lack crucial evidence(D) Thus human infants do not learn their first languages by means of datadriven learning. (E) Conclusion: Humans learn their first languages by means of innately primed learning.This gloss on the PSA is one that Chomsky would accept as an appropriate schematization of the PSA, though Chomsky believes that there is more evidence to support a belief in innate domain-specific knowledge than the PSA. …