What aspects of knowledge emerge in children prior to their first contacts with the objects of their knowledge, and what aspects emerge through the shaping effects of experience with those objects? What aspects of knowledge are constant over human development from the moment that infants begin to make sense of the world, and what aspects change as children grow and learn? What aspects of knowle...

Generative Grammar came to the attention of psychologists by way of its trenchant critique of behaviorist theories of language acquisition and use, and indeed that critique played an important role in the cognitive revolution (Chomsky, 1959). But along with Generative Grammar-hiding under its coattails, so to speak-came a curious brand of nativism (Chomsky, 1968). What was most curious from the...

The “New Synthesis” in cognitive science is committed to the computational theory of mind (CTM), massive modularity, nativism, and adaptationism. In The mind doesn’t work that way, Jerry Fodor argues that CTM has problems explaining abductive or global inference, but that the New Synthesis offers no solution, since massive modularity is in fact incompatible with global cognitive processes. I ar...

the study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. the present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. the discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. the p...

This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cann...