Poverty of Stimulus: A Detrimental or Facilitative Argument in Favor of an Incremental Connectionist Model

Abstract

One of the most controversial issues in language acquisition is the notion of poverty of stimulus which led the greatest intellectual and linguist of the century, Noam Chomsky to conclude in favor of an innate ability for human being to pick up a language. But according to the connectionists in general, Chomsky somehow jumped to conclusion in that poverty of stimulus argument is not only not disadvantageous but also facilitative from a connectionist view. As a result, the present paper demonstrates that how Jeffrey Elman reasons that poverty of stimulus is an absolute advantage from a connectionist perspective in general and from an incremental connectionist point of view in particular considering a phenomenon such as language acquisition.