Language Learning in the Full Or, Why the Stimulus Might Not Be so Poor after All

Language acquisition is often said to require a massive innate body of language speciic knowledge in order to overcome the poverty of stimulus. In this picture, language learning merely implies setting a number of parameters in an internal Universal Grammar. But is the primary linguistic evidence really so poor that it warrants such an extreme nativism? Is there no room for a more empiricist oriented approach to language acquisition? In this paper, I argue against the extreme nativist position, discussing recent results from psycholinguistics and connectionist research on natural language. Speciically, I eschew the competence/performance distinction traditionally presupposed in linguistics, advocating a close relationship between the representation of grammar and the processing mechanism. Abandoning the innnite grammatical competence allows us to focus on regular languages. This signiicantly restricts the computational complexity that such models will face regarding both learning and processing. The learning task is further facilitated by an inversion of the perspective on the relation between natural language and the human learning mechanism , suggesting that language is an artifact heavily constrained by the human learning mechanism. This is supplemented by evidence concerning the way maturational development alleviates language learning. Construing natural language as a maturationally constrained artifact promises to overcome the predicament following a classic formal language learning 1 proof; viz., that no interesting language can be learned from positive examples alone. Together, these arguments strongly suggest that some sort of non-trivial empiricist language learning is possible after all|because, given the right assumptions, the stimulus is not really that poor.