Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Language is made anew by each generation. Pinker and other Chomskyans claim that most of language is already there, and is at most triggered by what children hear. They argue that children never hear enough instances to be able to construct the language in the way they do. They call this the 'poverty of stimulus argument'.
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There may be truth in this (in fact I'm sure there is, how much I don't know), but how do you account for the fact that I learned French as a child, and you learned English (presumably)? Neither of us invented a new language. We learned the sounds we heard from adults around us, and we learned to repeat them. Then we learned words, and we learned to make sentences with them, also based on what we heard. Based on repeating what we heard, inferring rules from it, and applying them to other words to create sentences we never heard before. Imitation is by far not all there is to learning, but it's one of the basic bricks.