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Focus on facts not fiction: Commentary on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Christina Behme
Christina Behme*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
*
Department of Philosophy Dalhousie University 6135 University Avenue PO Box 15000 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4R2 [christinabehme@gmail.com]
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Abstract

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven could have provided a stronger argument for their conclusion, which postulated that innate universal-grammar-specified knowledge does not simplify the language learning task, had they not paid so much attention to the Chomskyan paradigm. I argue that poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments do not take into account that children are opportunistic learners employing multiple strategies, that they do not accomplish individual tasks sequentially but acquire (partial) knowledge about multiple domains simultaneously, and that they do not acquire perfect knowledge of language. Furthermore, work in formal linguistics suggests that the Chomskyan paradigm is internally incoherent and that the formalism of the Chomskyan framework lacks mathematical precision, making it difficult to evaluate its predictions. Given that linguistics ought to provide crucial input for language acquisition research, more attention needs to be paid to non-Chomskyan work in linguistics.

Keywords

universal grammarpoverty of the stimulusinnate knowledgecomputational modelingword segmentationlinguistic realism

Information

Type
Perspectives
Information
Language , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , September 2014, pp. e97 - e106
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Linguistic Society of America

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