This unique contribution to the ongoing discussion of language acquisition considers the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus in language learning in the context of the wider debate over cognitive, computational, and linguistic issues.
Critically examines the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus - the theory that the linguistic input which children receive is insufficient to explain the rich and rapid development of their knowledge of their first language(s) through general learning mechanisms
Focuses on formal learnability properties of the class of natural languages, considered from the perspective of several learning theoretic models
The only current book length study of arguments for the poverty of the stimulus which focuses on the computational learning theoretic aspects of the problem
About the Author
Alexander Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the co-editor, with Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin, of The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Shalom Lappin is Professor of Computational Linguistics at King's College, London. He is editor of TheHandbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); co-author, with Chris Fox, of Foundations of Intensional Semantics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) and, with Alexander Clark and Chris Fox, co-editor of The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
