Talk:Poverty of the stimulus

message: 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)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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: ). 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)
replies: text: 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  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)
thread_title: Poverty of the Stimulus and negative evidence

message: 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)
thread_title:  Added a response to Pullum and Scholz 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Gold's Theorem overapplied? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Infinite recursion: real or not? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  God awful 

message: 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)
thread_title: Unbalanced

message: The article discusses the learning of how to invert word order using bad examples, one of which is incorrectly described. The first example is the sentence "You are happy," in which the word "are" is incorrectly called an auxiliary verb. It is not the auxiliary verb, it is the main verb, linking to a predicate adjective. In a discussion about inverting of auxiliary verbs, the example should be a sentence with an auxiliary verb, for example, "You are bleeding."
The second example is the sentence "Anyone who is interested can see me later." This is a bad example because it is not a statement about the world, it is an expression of willingness on the part of the speaker to help the listeners or readers. One might turn an offer of assistance into a question (I am willing to help you -> Am I willing to help you?) — but it's not the best example. "Can anyone who is interested see me later?" isn't really a question; it's structured that way only for politeness. It really means something like, "My allotted minute is up, so if you are interested in hearing more about this, please see me later." The only responses expected are silence or "Yes"; is not intended to generate a "No" response, as in "No, Professor, I'm interested, but I can't see you later." A better example would be a sentence that inverts to a real question to which one could really answer Yes or No. 
A further problem is that a normal question (as opposed to a sentence structured as a question for the purpose of politeness) can be answered literally without conducting a poll. For example, the question "Is the girl wearing the pink dress late for supper?" is answerable by checking to see if supper has started and if the girl is at the table. But the question "Can anyone who is interested see me later?", taken as a literal yes-or-no question, cannot be answered until the entire population of potentially interested people is polled to find out which ones are interested, and whether any of those interested are able to see the questioner later. The absurdity of conducting such a poll to answer the question illustrates that the question is not intended to be take as a literal yes-or-no question. So, it's a bad example; a good example would invert a statement into a question that is intended to be taken literally. 
I leave it for more knowledgeable people to improve the examples, ideally based on examples in the literature (to avoid original research), but, unless someone either changes the examples or replies here and explains why these two examples really are good ones after all, eventually I will change the examples in the article. Anomalocaris (talk) 09:40, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad examples and incorrectly described 

message: When chomsky claimed that "we cannot seriously propose that a child learns the values of 10 to the 9 parameters in a childhood lasting only 10 to the 8 seconds", he ignored the fact that the amount of genetic information humans have evolved since the human/chimpanzee split is less than 6 times 10 to the 7 base pairs, placing nativism even further from being able to explain language acquisition than classical behaviorism was (classical behaviorism is as dead as nativism ought to be, modern behaviorism is based on emergents). This highlights the necessity of something like spontaneous emergence of abstraction from statistical sampling of empirical data.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.209.191.62 (talk) 12:30, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poverty of the genome. 

message: the POS is often presented as a mathematically proven idea, but doesn't the detailed math make assumptions that are unrealistic ? (sorta like economics sometimes ?)
also, having young children, maybe I'm more verbal then most parents, but the idea that children don't get a lot of neg criticism - is there any empirical data there ?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:6:3880:CC8:DCF5:EA4D:171A:DD3F (talk) 00:43, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Gold's theorem is true and the proof is sound.  Not all linguists understand this very well -- some fairly big names still claim conspicuous absence counts as negative evidence for the purpose of Gold's theorem, but it does not.  However: If you loosen your definition of language learning from "always recognizes all and only grammatically correct productions" to "recognizes correct productions with an arbitrarily small rate of error", then Gold's theorem simply no longer applies, and a proof of learnability in the abstract has existed since the late 1960s.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.133.79.135 (talk) 13:06, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: the POS rests on shaky math ?

message: The argument has long been controversial within the field of linguistics[citation needed],
I nearly spewed.  That's the funniest use of "citation needed" I've seen yet. 
; controversy (n.) : see Noam Chomsky.
— MaxEnt 15:41, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Citations added.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 16:09, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good humour 

message: It would probably be helpful to cite and clarify your definitions of positive and negative evidence in the premises section...  Arguably, there is a difference between direct and indirect evidence, and most (if not all) of the evidence that children receive is indirect since children only hear the output of the grammatical system and are not told the rules that compose that system.  Children infer that sentences they hear are grammatical (indirect positive evidence) and infer that certain kinds of sentences that are not heard are ungrammatical (indirect negative evidence).  Correction also serves as indirect negative evidence, but it is important to note that children don't usually pay attention or correct their speech even when they are told that an utterance is ungrammatical.  
Citation [9] also seems like it is not entirely credible since it seems like it is from a blog, though the information cited appears to be good.  You might try citing Gleitman and Newport (1995) who portray a strong argument for the poverty of the stimulus and the necessity of innate mechanisms for learning a language.  That article also provides further evidence that could be included in the "For the Argument" section of this article (they discuss the ability of home signers, blind children, and deaf children to acquire language and demonstrate the need for an innate mechanism to lay the groundwork for an individual (even if deprived of linguistic input) to learn language).  Additionally, it could be helpful to have sections/subheadings for the different evidence that supports the POS argument or denies the POS argument (for example, have a section explaining how home signers support POS, then how blind children's learning of language supports POS, and then have a section about how subject aux inversion supports POS, etc.)
--Rcsender (talk) 16:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Bringing up nativism in the introduction and not name-dropping empiricism until the "See Also" section is perhaps a bit biased, I think Zwiseguy15 (talk) 17:06, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  This page needs some serious grammatical help. Many of sentences have in correct grammar and poor word choice. Good writing is especially important to convey these complex theories with out being bias. Maggicurrier (talk) 20:05, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Potential Changes?

message: It may be because the subject is so rather steep, but this article from the introductory sentences on would be near impossible for a novice, non-linguist to be able to comprehend. Might I suggest taking advantage of the links and linking the instances of jargon to an existing Wikipedia page that would go into more depth explaining  the word so that the article can run smoothly without losing readers or getting hung up on defining thing ancillary to the topic of the article.For example, I linked the word "underdetermined" to a Wiki article about Underdeterminacy and left your definition intact. That would be one waay of smoothing out the artilce. I kow this is a braod subject, but a few minor details make all the difference
ImJustHereSoIWontGetFined (talk) 18:46, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much Jargon

message: Collective revamping the article by University of Maryland's Child Language Acquisition class. We reduced jargon in the introduction and made concepts easier to understand for non-linguists. Changed wording and eliminated unnecessary sections. We added to the summary section with an Innateness and Nativism section and retitled it Background. We changed the evidence from being negative and positive evidence to being one section on evidence for the POS argument, which includes Syntax, Phonology, and Semantics sections, and another separate section on entitled Other Arguments. Prosetta (talk) 21:47, 18 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revamp! 

message: It seems that in the referenced work The Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus, the degeneracy in quality is not about the speech error claimed here but 
"the input itself does not contain information about the kinds of representations that should be used in building a generative grammar of the language".
Actually, in the referenced work, the author has clarified that the degeneracy in quality does not mean that: 
"These notions of degeneracy should be not be confused with others. For example, Hornstein and Lightfoot (1981) note that speech to children contains speech errors, slips of the tongue, utterances produced by foreigners, etc., all of which might interfere with acquisition. While learners certainly do need to overcome this kind of degeneracy, what might be called the noise of the signal, the critical point about the degeneracy of the input from the perspective of the poverty of the stimulus is that the primary linguistic data (PLD) is (a) limited in scope and (b) uninformative with respect to choosing the appropriate representational vocabulary."
--Iotac (talk) 15:08, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the degeneracy in quality in Background and history