Poverty Of The Stimulus Argument Analysis

The Poverty of the Stimulus argument asserts that children would be unable to pick up grammar solely through the finite data available to them; therefore they must complement this information with some innate linguistic ability, and negative evidence. From an early age, children develop the ability to form sentences and articulate themselves. They do this through intake and analysis of the data they are given, whether that be through the medium of speech or gesture. Children learning a new language use this available information and manipulate it to their liking, while still fitting within the constraints of Universal Grammar and articulating statements which are (largely) comprehensible. However, when taking the approach that the accessible

In the late 1950s, Skinner asserted that learning happens by children constructing theories, and receiving data to prove or disprove them. Induction is the process of hypothesis formation and confirmation. To explore children’s linguistic hypotheses we must look at the primary linguistic data, or PLD. This is the information available to a language learner, through their experience of the language. This constitutes positive evidence, as it provides tangible examples to the child. This can also include negative data; negative data is evidence which proves that something is wrong, i.e. if a child decides a sentence is wrong because their mistake has been pointed out by an authoritative figure. Negative data is under the umbrella of positive evidence, as although it is proving something wrong, it is still provable and aids to form rules and hypotheses. That said, it has been shown that children learning to speak for the first time rarely receive direct instruction in their first language, unlike those who might try learning a second language. Therefore the data given to them is even more limited as it is purely from absorption and rarely teaching. By looking at the PLD alone, it is clear that there is not enough information to disprove all the possible hypotheses. It is thus unclear how a child can, using the PLD they have, go

That said, children need to unlearn certain rules in order to avoid over generalisation, particularly in languages rife with irregularities. The PLD does not provide enough evidence to unlearn these models; the evidence needed is called negative evidence. Negative evidence is dissimilar to negative data, essentially because negative data exists while negative evidence does not. The same goes for positive data, which is palpable. Negative evidence is the kind of data which is not there and thus unavailable to the learner; in other words, generalising beyond available data. Using negative evidence would enable a learner to determine an incorrect hypothesis. The fact that certain structures don’t occur, or are unacceptable in language, is thanks to negative evidence, as there seems to be no concrete proof or evidence as to why they