LING 321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Childes, Empiricism, 18 Months

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 321
• Professor: Dimitrios Skordos

Document Summary

Article: what infants know about syntax but couldn"t have learned: experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months (lidz et al. ) This is an excellently written paper, if you write a paper like this for the final project, you"re golden. If this can be convincingly shown, then it is a strong argument for syntactic representations. Nativist: chomsky"s poverty of the stimulus : input underdetermines linguistic representations of adult grammar; grammar cannot be learned without innate mechanisms specific for language learning. Empiricist position: linguistic input contains enough info to account for their linguistic representations; that info can be extracted by general purpose learning mechanisms. These are theories and both sides eventually acknowledge that both sides of the argument can be necessary. This paper wants to provide evidence for the nativist position. They need to show that children have syntactic knowledge that they could not have learned; therefore, they have innate syntactic knowledge.