Poverty of the stimulus
ConceptSociety
A linguistic claim about language acquisition and innate cognitive biases.
1.25Uncommon
Uncommon
Poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus is a claim in linguistics that children lack sufficiently rich linguistic data to learn every feature of their language without innate, language-specific cognitive biases. It is used in arguments for universal grammar, which holds that some linguistic competence is innate. Coined by Noam Chomsky in 1980, the claim and its empirical and conceptual foundations remain debated.
- Field
- Linguistics
- Term coined by
- Noam Chomsky
- Status
- A topic of continuing debate in linguistics
Sources and credits
Sources and credits
- Article
- Poverty of the stimulus (English Wikipedia)
- Wikidata
- Q1780470
- Text
- Card text is adapted from the English Wikipedia article by an automated summary. Wikipedia content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for its contributors. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Article history and contributors
- Illustration
- By AviationFreak. Public domain · File page on Wikimedia CommonsAviationFreak, Own work, derived from sites.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Pearl2019Ms PovStimWithoutTears.pdf page 2 (below Threshold of Originality)Modifications: Placed on a plain background, resized and converted to WebP
- Popularity
- 39 median daily views (Wikimedia Pageviews API (all-access, user agent))
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