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ABSTRACT: A substantial proportion of philosophers are operating under the assumption that Chomsky's conception of language acquisition has refuted Quine's behavioristic conception (Gibson 1982). In this paper I will evaluate Quine's theory of language acquisition in light of Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument, and his claims that children are not corrected when using incorrect grammatical constructions, which are typically used to show that Quine's behavioristic project is impossible. I will demonstrate that current empirical research does not support either, Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument, or his claims about children not being corrected when using language incorrectly. It will be shown that Quine's behavioristic research program is still a live option and one that is currently better supported by empirical data than Chomsky's conception of language is.
Key Words: poverty of stimulus argument, auxiliary inversion, negative evidence, reinforcement, primary linguistic data
CHOMSKY AND QUINE ON LANGUAGE LEARNING
When it comes to the details of how children learn their first language there is a substantive difference between Chomsky and Quine. The primary difference between them centers on the role that they think reinforcement and punishment plays in a child learning his first language. The Quinean picture of a child learning his first language involves the child using his innate babbling instinct as he mouths various different words. Parents and others reinforce and punish these emittings until they shape the child's pattern of verbal behavior into the external shape of that child's social environment. As Quine put it in Word and Object (1960):
People growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike (1960, p. 8)
Linguistic nativist Chomsky disagrees with this Quinean picture. He thinks that the outward shape of language results not from the child's faltering attempts at speech being corrected by his peers, but from the child using his innate universal grammar to structure the data of experience, which the child contingently encounters.
The issue between Chomsky and Quine on this point is a purely empirical one. In the last twenty years much detailed evidence has emerged which...