Abstract
It was not so long ago that the focus in studies of all kinds of learning, including language learning, was on particular kinds of learning mechanisms, for example, on association or hypothesis-formation processes. The advent of generative grammar and the technical exploitation of the argument “from the poverty of the stimulus” (Chomsky 1965) recast the emphasis in the field of language acquisition, so that now many scholars look to structural assumptions as the basis for language learning. The basic idea is that the principles of Universal Grammar (UG) are innate in the child and that only certain limited aspects of grammar, perhaps the values of parameters, plus properties of the lexicon, have to be learned through interaction with experience.
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Wexler, K. (1987). On the Nonconcrete Relation between Evidence and Acquired Language. In: Lust, B. (eds) Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3387-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3387-3_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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