The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney’s discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics. Formally,...

One of the objectives of investigating child second language acquisition (SLA) is to find out to what extent it is similar to first language (L1) acquisition. Assuming that L1 acquisition is guided by principles of Universal Grammar (UG), it is often thought that second language (L2) acquisition by children is of the same nature, as it seems so easy for young learners to acquire a foreign langu...

We investigate a type of lossless source code called a grammar-based code, which, in response to any input data string over a fixed finite alphabet, selects a context-free grammar representing in the sense that is the unique string belonging to the language generated by . Lossless compression of takes place indirectly via compression of the production rules of the grammar . It is shown that, su...

2 Abstract The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis). Though there have been several r...

One motivation for Universal Grammar (UG) comes from the existence of induction problems in language acquisition, and their solutions. Previous induction problem characterizations have typically not recognized that INDIRECT POSITIVE evidence may be both available and useful, in addition to other types of evidence. As a case study, we investigate whether a probabilistic learner utilizing indirec...

A grammar transform is a transformation that converts any data sequence to be compressed into a grammar from which the original data sequence can be fully reconstructed. In a grammar-based code, a data sequence is first converted into a grammar by a grammar transform and then losslessly encoded. In this paper, a greedy grammar transform is first presented; this grammar transform constructs sequ...

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar requires marriage quantitative properties input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational is extended acquisition (L2A) explore verb-second word order optionality in L2 English. Patterns L1-German–L2-English are rev...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret the meanings of floated quantifiers on the basis of Categorial Grammar (Carpenter 1997) and Davidsonian semantics (Davidson 1980). In this approach, floated quantifiers are accounted for semantically as a kind of adverbial phrase so that we do not need any special syntactic operations, such as quantifier raising, in order to interpr...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate accuracy and reliability of 3 novel goniometers for measurement of canine stifle joint angles and compare the results with those obtained with a universal goniometer (UG). SAMPLE 8 pelvic limbs from 4 canine cadavers. PROCEDURES Each limb was secured to a wooden platform at 3 arbitrarily selected fixed stifle joint angles. Goniometry was performed with 2 smartphone-based a...