CONCEPT
Poverty of the Stimulus
The argument, central to Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky’s nativist linguistics, that children acquire grammar too fast, from input too sparse and error-strewn, for learning alone to explain it—and therefore that the mind must supply innate structure the data cannot.
A child hears a finite, impoverished, frequently ungrammatical sample of speech and from it reliably converges, within a few years and without explicit instruction, on a generative grammar that lets her produce and understand sentences she has never encountered. She makes the right kinds of mistakes—overregularizing “goed” and “holded,” indicating she has internalized a rule rather than memorized a list—but not the wrong kinds, never generating errors that a purely statistical learner would be expected to make. The poverty of the stimulus argument holds that this achievement is impossible if the child is a general-purpose learner: the data simply do not contain enough information to fix the grammar, and something must be supplied from the inside. That something is what Steven Pinker, following Chomsky, calls the
language instinct—a biological adaptation that biases the learner toward the kinds of grammars human languages actually have. The argument was the best-supported piece of nativism in cognitive science