debunking chomsky's poverty of the stimulus

Melody, a researcher in cognitive science at Stanford, has posted a detailed discussion of the problems with Chomsky's famed povery of the stimulus argument from the perspective of the last 40 years of computational learning models. Hindsight is always 20-20 right?

Money quote:

....there are at least two goals of modeling in cognitive science : 1) to discover the best computational method of accounting for a given phenomena, 2) to discover the best account that is also psychologically plausible. The goal has never been to rule out a whole class of models on the basis of one ill-starred example.  Because — quite frankly — models don’t deal in ‘logical possibilities.’  They are not mathematical or logical proofs.  Step 3 in Miller and Chomsky’s paper is a pseudo-scientific non sequitur.

The whole post is well worth reading.

Without The Hats

Ingrid at Language on the Move blog reports that the Student Council at Zayed University in the UAE is conducting a poll to see which languages students want to see offered, and Korean is winning (HT Research Blogging).

Rarely do language students get an actual say in institutional offerings and a current polling initiative by the Student Council at Zayed University is therefore the more exciting. This internal poll has been running for a couple of days and I can’t take my eyes of it: for a sociolinguist this is like Melbourne Cup Day without the hats!

Needless to say, I had to google Melbourne Cup Day.