1. The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument in Language Acquisition
History and current developments

2. Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton & Co.
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.

3. “A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, p. 4)

4. Foundational Assumptions
Native speakers possess knowledge about an underlying system of abstract rules
Acquiring a language: figuring out the rules
Actual utterances are performance
limited by memory, attention, etc.
incomplete, messy, noisy

5. Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
How can the underlying system of rules be inferred from incomplete data?
Emphasis on absence of negative evidence

6. 1 a) John thinks that Paul behaved badly.
1 b) How does John think that Paul behaved?

7. 1 a) John thinks that Paul behaved badly.
1 b) How does John think that Paul behaved?
2 a) John regrets that Paul behaved badly.
2 b) *How does John regret that Paul behaved?
(example from: Guasti, 2004)

8. 1 a) John said Bill liked the new Star Wars movie.

9. 1 a) John said Bill liked the new Star Wars movie.
1 b) Which movie did John say Bill liked?

10. 1 a) John said Bill liked the new Star Wars movie.
1 b) Which movie did John say Bill liked?
2 a) John wondered whether Bill liked the new SW movie.

11. 1 a) John said Bill liked the new Star Wars movie.
1 b) Which movie did John say Bill liked?
2 a) John wondered whether Bill liked the new SW movie.
2 b) *Which movie did John wonder whether Bill liked?

12. Negative Evidence
Endlessly many examples of sentences that are not possible in English
But you won’t hear people use such sentence
How come we know these sentences are not possible?

13. “It may well be that the general features of language structure reflect, not so much the course of one's experience, but rather the general character of one's capacity to acquire knowledge (…), one's innate ideas and innate principles.” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, p. 59)

14. Language Intuition
Generative Linguistics: explain our intuitions about language using formal linguistic theories
The knowledge characterized in these theories was and is often taken to be innate

15. Native Speaker Intuition
We tap into unconscious knowledge when making grammaticality judgments
Adult learners might never completely acquire this kind of intuitive knowledge

16. Sandy filled a jar with cookies last night.

17. Mr. Murphy hidded his money under his mattress.

18. John sing for the church choir yesterday.

19. Three boy played on the swings in the park

20. Critical Period for Morphosyntax?
Johnson and Newport (1989): rapid improvement before puberty, performance ceiling after puberty
Many replications, some of which support CP, while others only support general age effects

21. Minimal Pairs English: core vs. gore; best vs. vest; two vs. do
English distinguishes between voiced and unvoiced stops
two vs. do -- /tu/ vs. /du/

22. Minimal Pairs
Korean distinguishes between fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops
daughter (fortis) moon (lenis) mask (aspirated)

23. Choi, Cutler and Broersma (2017)
Train speakers to distinguish between Korean stops
Group 1: native speakers of Dutch
Group 2: native speakers of Dutch who were adopted from Korea at (pre-verbal)
Group 2 was faster to learn the contrast
Productions were judged as more accurate by native speakers

24. Minimal Pairs
Kuhl and Miller (1971): chinchillas can acquire the /b/ vs. /p/ contrast through training
Categorical perception is not unique to humans
General cognitive function rather than language specific

25. General Cognitive Principles
What appears to be linguistic knowledge could emerge from general cognitive principles
E.g. categorization, procedural learning, general efficiency principles

26. Futrell, Mahowald and Gibson (2015)
John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen.
(2) John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.

27. Recursion [Red is a nice color] [Bill said that [red is nice color]]
[John said that [Bill said that [red is a nice color]]]

28. Recursion [Red is a nice color] [Bill said that [red is nice color]]
[John said that [Bill said that [red is a nice color]]]
[Bill’s mother] came to town
[Bill’s [uncle’s mother]] came to town
[Bill’s [friend from high school’s [uncle’s mother]]] came to town

29. Recursion
Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002): recursion is the only innate linguistic property
This is also the point of view of the most current theory in generative linguistics (Chomsky, 2014)
There may be a language that does not utilize recursion (Everett, 2005)
You find recursion in vision (Martins, Muršič and Fitch, 2015) and music (Martinsa et al., 2017)

30. Poverty of the stimulus?
languages could “choose and pick” from a repertoire of possible cognitive mechanisms (Evans and Levinson, 2009)
Some, like recursion, could be innate
Others might be purely learned

31. 1 a) John said Bill liked the new Star Wars movie.
1 b) Which movie did John say Bill liked?
2 a) John wondered whether Bill liked the new SW movie.
2 b) *Which movie did John wonder whether Bill liked?

32. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton & Co.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2014). The minimalist program. MIT press.
Choi, J., Cutler, A., & Broersma, M. (2017). Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory. Royal Society Open Science, 4(1),
Crain, S., & Pietroski, P. (2001). Nature, nurture and universal grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy, 24(2),
Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(05),
Everett, D., (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Piraha: Another look at the design features of human language. Current Anthropology, 46(4),
Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Gibson, E. (2015). Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33),
Guasti, M. T. (2004). Language acquisition: The growth of grammar. MIT Press.
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298,
Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of the maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60-99
Kuhl, P. K., & Miller, J. D. (1971). Speech Perception by the Chinchilla: Voiced-Voiceless Distinction. Science, 190,
Martins, M. D. J. D., Muršič, Z., Oh, J., & Fitch, W. T. (2015). Representing visual recursion does not require verbal or motor resources. Cognitive Psychology, 77,
Martinsa, M. D., Gingrasc, B., Puig-Waldmuellerc, P., Fitch, W. T. (2017). Cognitive representation of “musical fractals”: Processing hierarchy and recursion in the auditory domain. Cognition, 161, 31-45