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Plato's problem

Plato's problem refers to the fundamental question in epistemology and cognitive science of how humans can acquire extensive and specific knowledge despite limited and often inadequate sensory input, a concept Noam Chomsky formalized in his 1986 work Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use to highlight the tension between empiricist views of learning and the apparent innateness of certain cognitive abilities.^[1] Chomsky described it as "how we know so much given so little evidence," drawing on Plato's ancient dialogues, such as the Meno, where Socrates demonstrates that an uneducated slave boy can grasp geometric truths through guided reasoning, suggesting innate ideas rather than pure experience.^[2] In the domain of linguistics, Plato's problem is central to Chomsky's poverty-of-the-stimulus argument, which posits that children rapidly master complex grammatical structures—such as recursive syntax or constraints on question formation—without explicit instruction or exposure to all possible data, implying an innate universal grammar as a biological endowment of the human mind.^[3] This acquisition process occurs universally across languages and cultures, with children converging on shared linguistic competence by around age five, far surpassing the fragmented input they receive from caregivers, who rarely provide negative evidence (corrections) for ungrammatical forms.^[3] For instance, English-speaking children intuitively avoid errors like "*Is the man who tall is happy?" despite never encountering such malformed sentences in their environment, demonstrating subconscious knowledge that exceeds empirical evidence.^[3] Beyond language, Plato's problem extends to other cognitive domains, such as moral reasoning and concept formation, where humans exhibit innate principles that guide judgments independently of cultural variation, challenging behaviorist and empiricist theories dominant in mid-20th-century psychology.^[2] Chomsky contrasts it with "Orwell's problem"—how humans know so little despite abundant information—emphasizing that solving Plato's problem requires investigating internal mental structures rather than external stimuli alone.^[2] This framework has profoundly influenced generative linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, promoting a nativist perspective that views the mind as equipped with domain-specific modules for knowledge acquisition.^[3]

Origins in ancient philosophy

Plato's Meno dialogue

The Meno is one of Plato's early dialogues, composed around 385 BCE and set in Athens circa 402 BCE during a period of political and moral reflection following the Peloponnesian War.^[4] In this work, Plato explores epistemological questions through a conversation between Socrates, the Thessalian visitor Meno, and the Athenian politician Anytus, focusing primarily on the nature of virtue (aretê) and whether it can be taught. The dialogue begins with Meno pressing Socrates on whether virtue is acquired through teaching, practice, or some natural endowment, prompting Socrates to insist first on defining what virtue is—a pursuit that exposes the interlocutors' professed knowledge as mere opinion.^[4] Anytus joins briefly, warning against slandering educators like the sophists, but the core exchange between Meno and Socrates reveals the challenges of inquiry into ethical matters without a stable foundation.^[5] A pivotal moment arises when Meno, frustrated by their inability to define virtue, poses the paradox of inquiry: "How will you aim to search for [the nature of virtue], Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you do not know?" (80d).^[5] Socrates reformulates this as a dilemma: one cannot seek what one knows, since it is already possessed, nor what one does not know, since it would be unrecognizable (80e). To resolve this impasse, Socrates proposes that knowledge is not acquired anew but recollected (anamnesis) from the soul's prior existence, drawing on Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of the soul's immortality.^[4] Socrates demonstrates this theory through an experiment with Meno's uneducated slave boy, using geometric questions to elicit mathematical truths without explicit instruction. He draws a square with sides of two feet, area four square feet, and asks how to construct a square double the area (82b-e). The boy initially errs, suggesting a side of four feet would yield eight square feet, but Socrates guides him to see it produces sixteen square feet instead (82e-83a). Through further questioning, the boy realizes the correct side length is the diagonal of the original square, forming a square of eight square feet without being told the solution outright (84a-85b). Key exchanges include the boy's admission: "I certainly don't know" (82c), followed by his step-by-step reasoning to the diagonal as the key, as Socrates notes, "He is finding out for himself" (84c).^[5] This process, Socrates argues, shows the boy recollecting innate geometric knowledge, untaught yet latent in his soul (85d). Concluding the demonstration, Socrates asserts: "If he [the slave] did not recollect before, but now recollects, and if he did so by being asked questions, then everyone who is correctly questioned will recollect, since to recollect is to learn" (85d). He extends this to claim the soul is immortal, having pre-existed in a state where it beheld all truths, thus possessing innate ideas that inquiry merely awakens (81a-86b). This recollection theory underpins Plato's broader notion of innate knowledge, suggesting human learning taps into eternal forms rather than empirical input alone.^[4]

Concept of innate knowledge

In Plato's philosophy, true knowledge pertains to the eternal and perfect Forms—unchanging ideals such as those embodying geometric principles or abstract concepts like justice—which exist independently of the physical world and are innate to the human soul, accessible solely through rational inquiry rather than sensory perception.^[6] This innateness implies that the soul possesses an inherent grasp of these Forms, enabling individuals to recognize universal truths without deriving them from empirical observation.^[4] The core mechanism underlying this innate knowledge is anamnesis, or recollection, whereby the immortal soul pre-exists the body, encounters and learns the Forms in a disembodied state, and upon incarnation forgets this knowledge due to the corrupting influence of the material world.^[4] Learning, therefore, is not the acquisition of new information but the process of reactivating and remembering this pre-existing understanding through philosophical dialectic and introspection.^[7] As briefly illustrated in Plato's slave boy example, an untaught individual can recollect basic geometric truths when prompted by logical questioning, demonstrating the soul's latent capacity for such knowledge.^[4] Plato's framework stands in direct opposition to the empiricist tendencies prevalent in his era, particularly among Sophists who emphasized sensory experience and probabilistic opinion (doxa) as the foundation of understanding, which he dismissed as unreliable and illusory due to the deceptive nature of the senses.^[6] Instead, genuine knowledge (episteme) arises from the soul's rational ascent to the immutable Forms, transcending the flux of the phenomenal realm.^[4] This Platonic conception of innate knowledge as recollection exerted a lasting influence on subsequent philosophy, echoing in Augustine's doctrine of divine illumination—where eternal truths are illuminated within the mind by God—and in Descartes' theory of innate ideas, which posits certain fundamental concepts as inherently present in the intellect from creation.^[8]^[9]

Modern formulation in linguistics

Chomsky's introduction of the term

Noam Chomsky introduced the term "Plato's problem" in his 1986 book Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use, where he presented it as a foundational puzzle for understanding human cognitive achievements in the modern scientific era.^[1] This formulation revived ancient philosophical concerns about the origins of knowledge, adapting them to contemporary inquiries in linguistics and psychology by emphasizing the gap between limited input and vast output in mental faculties. At its core, Chomsky defined Plato's problem through the question: "How can we know so much given so little evidence?"^[10] This query highlights the challenge of accounting for the richness, specificity, and complexity of knowledge—particularly linguistic competence—that individuals possess, despite the sparse and often ambiguous data available from their environment.^[1] Chomsky positioned this as a direct counter to empiricist traditions, arguing that such knowledge cannot arise solely from external stimulation but requires positing innate cognitive structures to bridge the explanatory gap.^[2] Chomsky's introduction of the term marked a culmination of his decades-long critique of behaviorist approaches to learning, exemplified by B.F. Skinner's stimulus-response model in Verbal Behavior (1957), which Chomsky dismantled in his influential 1959 review as inadequate for explaining creative language use. Earlier foundational work, such as Syntactic Structures (1957), had already shifted the field toward generative grammar, proposing that humans possess an innate universal grammar enabling rapid acquisition of intricate linguistic systems.^[11] By 1986, Plato's problem encapsulated this paradigm, framing innate mechanisms as essential for resolving the apparent underdetermination of knowledge by experience.^[1]

Argument from poverty of the stimulus

The argument from poverty of the stimulus asserts that children acquire intricate knowledge of grammar despite exposure to primary linguistic data that is limited, degenerate, and insufficiently informative to determine the correct hypothesis among countless alternatives.^[12] This input, drawn from caregivers' speech, often includes performance errors, incomplete utterances, and ambiguities, while crucially lacking systematic negative evidence—corrections or indications of what is ungrammatical.^[13] Children produce initial overgeneralizations in simple structures, such as negation (e.g., "*I no go"), but rapidly self-correct to adult-like forms without relying on explicit feedback, suggesting internal constraints guide the process.^[14] A prominent example involves the acquisition of auxiliary inversion in English yes-no questions, where children must apply a structure-dependent rule that inverts the auxiliary verb from the main clause rather than from an adjacent embedded clause.^[12] Thus, from a declarative like "The man who is tall is happy," the correct question is "Is the man who is tall happy?"—not the erroneous "*Is the man who tall is happy?" which a simpler, proximity-based rule might yield. Complex examples like this are scarce in child-directed speech, yet experimental evidence shows children as young as three to five years old consistently produce and comprehend the structure-dependent forms without errors.^[15] The logical structure of the argument emphasizes the vastness of the hypothesis space: innumerable grammars are logically possible, and the meager input is compatible with many that would generate ungrammatical outputs for novel sentences, rendering learning indeterminate without additional constraints.^[12] Innate principles of Universal Grammar are thus posited to restrict the class of learnable languages, guiding acquisition toward the target grammar efficiently, though alternative accounts like statistical learning have been proposed to explain this without strict innateness.^[16]^[17] Chomsky articulated this reasoning in his 1986 book Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Supporting evidence comes from longitudinal studies tracking child speech over time, which demonstrate rapid mastery of rules exceeding the input's evidential base. In Roger Brown's 1973 study of three English-learning children—Adam, Eve, and Sarah—transcripts spanning ages two to four years revealed that the children generalized syntactic patterns, such as auxiliary placement and negation, at stages where corresponding adult models were infrequent or absent in the corpus.^[14] For example, the children avoided persistent overregularizations in questions and achieved adult-like accuracy in complex structures sooner than frequency-based learning models would predict, underscoring the role of internal constraints in overcoming input limitations.^[18]

Core concepts and mechanisms

Underdetermination by evidence

Underdetermination of theory by evidence is a philosophical principle asserting that, for any given body of empirical data, multiple incompatible theories can be formulated that are equally consistent with that data, rendering evidence insufficient to uniquely identify the true theory.^[19] This concept underscores the limitations of inductive reasoning in science and epistemology, where observations alone cannot conclusively adjudicate between rival hypotheses.^[19] Quine's thesis of holism further elaborates this by arguing that scientific statements are tested not in isolation but as part of an interconnected web of beliefs, allowing adjustments in auxiliary assumptions to accommodate any data without falsifying the core theory.^[19] The historical roots of underdetermination trace to the early 20th century, particularly the Duhem-Quine thesis, first articulated by physicist Pierre Duhem in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906), which contended that physical experiments test entire theoretical systems rather than individual propositions, and later extended by philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), emphasizing the holistic confirmation of scientific knowledge.^[19] While this formulation emerged in modern philosophy of science, it resonates with ancient concerns about evidential insufficiency, as seen in Plato's dialogues, where knowledge acquisition appears constrained by inadequate sensory evidence.^[20] In the context of Plato's problem, as formulated by Noam Chomsky, underdetermination highlights the discrepancy between the complexity and abstraction of human cognitive achievements—such as grasping universal principles—and the sparse, variable nature of experiential input available during development. This evidential gap suggests that sensory data alone cannot account for the attainment of such knowledge structures, pointing to the need for additional constraints beyond empirical evidence to explain cognitive capacities.^[20] A linguistic manifestation of this issue is the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, where learners converge on grammars despite limited positive evidence.^[20] This challenge is not unique to cognition but pervades the natural sciences, as evidenced by parallels in physics. For instance, in quantum mechanics, empirically equivalent interpretations like the Copenhagen view, which posits wave function collapse, and the many-worlds interpretation, which embraces branching realities, both fit the same observational data yet diverge fundamentally in their metaphysical commitments.^[19] Similarly, models of particle interactions in high-energy physics can be underdetermined, where multiple parameter sets or theoretical frameworks accommodate collider experiment results equally well, requiring non-empirical criteria like simplicity or explanatory power for selection.^[19] These examples illustrate the ubiquity of underdetermination, reinforcing its role as a foundational issue across scientific domains.^[19]

Innateness hypothesis in cognition

The innateness hypothesis posits that certain cognitive capacities are biologically endowed, providing humans with predispositions to acquire specific forms of knowledge despite limited environmental input. This addresses the underdetermination of cognitive structures by evidence, proposing that innate mechanisms guide development. In Noam Chomsky's framework, the language faculty exemplifies this as a "cognitive organ," an inherited genetic endowment akin to other biological systems, enabling rapid acquisition of complex structures through maturation rather than solely through learning.^[21]^[20] Biological evidence supports this hypothesis through genetic and neural factors. Twin studies demonstrate substantial heritability for cognitive abilities, with monozygotic twins showing higher concordance for linguistic and general cognitive traits than dizygotic twins, estimating heritability at 0.41–0.66 for high cognitive ability in childhood, rising to approximately 0.80 for IQ in adulthood. Specific language-related abilities, such as phonological awareness and morphosyntax, exhibit heritability ranging from 0.25 to 0.81, indicating domain-specific genetic influences that align with innate predispositions. Neural localization further underscores this, as structures like Broca's area in the left frontal lobe are specialized for speech production and syntactic processing, reflecting an evolved biological architecture for cognitive functions.^[22]^[23]^[24]^[25]^[20] Developmental evidence highlights critical periods during which innate capacities mature, favoring biological unfolding over pure experiential learning. These periods, typically from infancy to puberty, represent windows of heightened brain plasticity where environmental stimuli interact with genetic programs to shape cognition; for instance, disruptions during this time impair acquisition more severely than later interventions. Genes like FOXP2, associated with speech and language disorders, illustrate how genetic variations influence neural circuits during these phases.^[20]^[26] The hypothesis distinguishes itself from extreme nativism by emphasizing that innate structures are not fully formed at birth but require parameterization through experience. Innate principles provide a framework of constraints and options, which environmental input selects and refines, allowing flexibility while ensuring efficient cognitive development. This interactionist view integrates biology with learning, avoiding the notion of prewired, unchangeable knowledge.^[21]^[20]

Implications for cognitive science

Applications to language acquisition

Plato's problem manifests prominently in the process of child language acquisition, where young learners construct sophisticated grammars from fragmentary and degenerate input, far exceeding what experience alone could provide. This underdetermination is addressed through the innateness hypothesis, positing that humans are equipped with a Universal Grammar (UG), an innate system of linguistic principles that guides acquisition. Children thus rapidly attain fluency in their native language by 4-5 years of age, mastering recursion and hierarchical structures despite exposure to only a subset of possible sentences. The progression through stages of language development illustrates how innate mechanisms interact with environmental input to resolve Plato's problem. Infants begin with reflexive crying and cooing in the first few months, transitioning to babbling around 6 months, where they produce consonant-vowel sequences mimicking language sounds. By 12-18 months, the holophrastic stage emerges, with single words conveying propositional meanings, such as "ball" for "I want the ball." The two-word stage follows at 18-24 months, forming basic combinations like "mommy go," and telegraphic speech at 24-36 months omits functors while capturing core semantics, as in "doggie run fast." Complex syntax, including subordinate clauses and questions, is mastered between 36 months and school entry, enabling sentences like "The boy who saw the dog ran away." These stages reflect parameter setting within UG, triggered by positive evidence, allowing children to generalize beyond heard utterances efficiently. A central role of UG in this process involves parameters, binary options that account for cross-linguistic variation while ensuring universals. For instance, the head-direction parameter determines phrase structure order, set to head-initial (verb before object, as in English "eat apple") or head-final (object before verb, as in Japanese "ringo taberu") based on early input cues like prosody and word order frequency. This limited set of parameters—estimated at dozens—enables children to converge on adult grammar quickly, explaining why acquisition timelines are similar across languages despite diverse inputs. Without such innate options, the space of possible grammars would be too vast for feasible learning.^[27] Experimental evidence supports the innateness of core UG components, particularly recursion, which permits embedding structures like "The cat that chased the mouse that ate the cheese slept." Berwick and Chomsky (2016) demonstrate that recursion emerges spontaneously in early child speech, independent of external teaching, as children produce nested phrases by age 3 across unrelated languages, suggesting an evolved, species-specific computational primitive rather than learned behavior. This capacity addresses Plato's problem by providing an infinite generative system from finite data.^[28] Innate constraints also explain how children bridge evidentiary gaps, such as avoiding persistent overgeneralizations absent from input. For example, while young children temporarily produce irregular forms like "goed" for "went," they retreat to correct "went" without explicit negative feedback, guided by UG principles favoring morphological defaults and subset grammars that prevent unlearnable overextensions. This self-correction, observed in longitudinal studies of English-acquiring children, underscores how innate biases constrain hypothesis space, ensuring convergence on target grammar despite impoverished stimuli.^[29]^[30]

Extensions to other domains of knowledge

Plato's problem, which posits that innate cognitive structures are necessary to explain the acquisition of complex knowledge from limited input, has been extended to vision and perception through theories of modular mental architecture. Jerry Fodor's modularity hypothesis argues that perceptual systems, including vision, operate as innate, domain-specific modules that process sensory information rapidly and independently of higher-level beliefs.^[31] These modules, such as those for object recognition, are encapsulated, meaning they function automatically without interference from general knowledge, as evidenced by persistent optical illusions like the Müller-Lyer effect despite awareness of their illusory nature.^[31] This framework builds on Chomsky's innate language faculty by proposing similar specialized, innate mechanisms for perceptual domains, enabling efficient environmental navigation from birth.^[31] In moral reasoning, extensions of Plato's problem invoke an innate "universal moral grammar" that underpins intuitive judgments across cultures. Marc Hauser's theory, outlined in his 2006 work (though later controversial due to his 2011 finding of scientific misconduct in related research), proposes that humans possess an innate moral faculty analogous to Chomsky's universal grammar, allowing the rapid development of moral competence despite sparse explicit instruction.^[32]^[33] This faculty relies on universal principles, such as distinctions between intentional actions and omissions or personal versus impersonal harm, which are processed unconsciously and computationally, as demonstrated in cross-cultural responses to moral dilemmas like the trolley problem.^[33] By addressing the "poverty of the moral stimulus," this approach explains how diverse moral systems emerge from shared innate foundations.^[33] The problem also applies to mathematics and logic via innate core knowledge systems for numerical cognition. Stanislas Dehaene's research on the "number sense" reveals an innate, preverbal ability to approximate quantities and detect numerosity, present in human newborns and shared with other animals, as shown in experiments where infants match auditory and visual quantities without training.^[34] This core system, part of broader innate knowledge domains, enables the acquisition of formal mathematics despite limited early exposure, directly echoing Plato's ancient demonstration in the Meno dialogue of elicited geometric knowledge.^[34] Dehaene posits that such mechanisms form a mental number line, facilitating logical reasoning and arithmetic from rudimentary inputs.^[34] From an evolutionary perspective, innate cognitive structures addressed by Plato's problem confer adaptive value by solving recurrent survival challenges in ancestral environments. Evolutionary psychology views these structures as domain-specific adaptations shaped by natural selection, such as modules for detecting cheaters in social exchanges or recognizing fertile mates via physical cues, which enhanced reproductive success and group cohesion.^[35] Although optimized for Pleistocene-era problems, these innate mechanisms persist because they provided fitness advantages, like rapid threat detection through perceptual modules, underscoring the biological necessity of innateness for cognitive efficiency.^[35]

Criticisms and alternative perspectives

Empirical and methodological challenges

One key empirical challenge to the innateness hypothesis underlying Plato's problem arises from debates over the richness of linguistic input available to children during acquisition. Traditional arguments, such as the poverty of the stimulus, assume that children receive limited and error-filled corrective feedback, necessitating innate knowledge to explain rapid language mastery. However, studies demonstrate that caregivers provide more frequent and effective negative evidence than previously thought, with children actively responding to such input by correcting their own errors. For instance, experimental research shows that when children produce incorrect forms like overregularized past tenses (e.g., "goed"), parental recasts or contrasts with correct forms lead to immediate improvements in grammatical accuracy, suggesting that environmental feedback plays a substantial role in shaping grammar without relying on pre-wired structures.^[36] Cross-cultural and typological evidence further questions the universality of innate grammatical principles posited by Universal Grammar (UG). While UG predicts a core set of shared linguistic features across all languages due to biological endowment, extensive documentation of the world's approximately 7,159 languages (as of 2025) reveals profound diversity in syntax, morphology, and semantics that defies strict universal constraints. For example, languages like Pirahã, which has been argued to lack recursion (though this is debated)—a supposedly innate property—while others exhibit ergative alignment or evidential systems absent in Indo-European tongues, indicating that acquisition patterns vary significantly by cultural and environmental factors rather than a fixed innate template. This variability challenges the idea that children universally access the same innate knowledge base, as learners in diverse settings achieve fluency through exposure to language-specific regularities.^[37]^[38] Neuroimaging research has yet to provide direct support for dedicated innate modules governing grammar, instead highlighting the brain's plasticity in response to linguistic experience. Functional MRI and EEG studies of infants and children show that language processing recruits general-purpose networks involved in pattern recognition and social cognition, with no localized "language acquisition device" evident from birth. Early exposure to speech shapes cortical areas like the superior temporal gyrus through experience-dependent plasticity, allowing reorganization even after early disruptions such as cochlear implants, which enable typical development without presupposed innate modules. This evidence suggests that grammatical knowledge emerges from dynamic neural adaptation rather than fixed, genetically determined structures.^[39]^[40] Methodologically, testing innateness hypotheses in linguistics faces significant hurdles related to falsifiability, complicating efforts to distinguish innate from learned knowledge. Proponents of UG often adjust theoretical parameters post hoc to accommodate counterexamples, rendering predictions difficult to disprove definitively, as claims about universals can be reframed as statistical tendencies or deep principles inaccessible to direct observation. For example, the absence of expected universal traits in certain languages is sometimes explained by invoking "microparameters" or exceptions, which dilutes the hypothesis's empirical testability and shifts the burden of proof. These issues underscore the challenge in designing experiments that could conclusively verify or refute innate linguistic endowment.^[37]

Empiricist and connectionist counterarguments

Empiricists have revived arguments against innate knowledge structures by emphasizing the sufficiency of general learning mechanisms and social experience in acquiring complex cognitive abilities, particularly language. Michael Tomasello's usage-based theory posits that children construct linguistic knowledge through iterative exposure to language in social contexts, relying on intention-reading skills and domain-general cognitive processes such as pattern recognition and analogy, without requiring specialized innate modules.^[41] In this framework, grammar and syntax emerge incrementally from children's participation in communicative interactions, where caregivers provide rich, contingent input that scaffolds learning.^[42] Connectionist models offer a computational counterpoint, demonstrating how neural networks can acquire linguistic patterns through statistical learning alone, bypassing the need for predefined rules or innate parameters. The seminal work by Rumelhart and McClelland modeled the acquisition of English past-tense verb forms using a parallel distributed processing network that adjusts connection weights based on exposure to input-output pairs, successfully capturing both regular and irregular patterns via emergent generalization rather than explicit rule encoding.^[43] This approach highlights how distributed representations in layered networks can simulate developmental trajectories, including overgeneralization errors observed in children, by leveraging probabilistic associations in the linguistic environment.^[44] Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as those in the GPT series, extend these connectionist ideas by showing that massive-scale statistical learning from textual data can generate human-like grammatical structures and syntactic competence without any innate grammatical priors. These models challenge the poverty of the stimulus by demonstrating that abundant, albeit artificial, input suffices to induce complex language patterns, aligning with empiricist perspectives and prompting reevaluation of nativist claims in light of AI capabilities as of 2025.^[45] Bayesian frameworks further challenge domain-specific innateness by framing learning as probabilistic inference over hypotheses, informed by broad inductive biases rather than language-exclusive priors. Tenenbaum and colleagues propose that cognitive development, including aspects of language acquisition, arises from integrating sparse data with structured background knowledge through Bayesian updating, where learners infer concepts like word meanings or grammatical categories by weighing evidence against a space of possible structures derived from general principles of simplicity and coherence.^[46] These models emphasize the role of rich perceptual and statistical cues in the input, allowing general-purpose inference mechanisms to resolve apparent underdetermination without invoking specialized innate machinery. A central contrast in these empiricist and connectionist perspectives is their rejection of the poverty of the stimulus argument, asserting instead that the input to learners contains sufficient, albeit subtle, statistical regularities—such as transitional probabilities between sounds or contextual co-occurrences—that general learning algorithms can exploit to induce complex knowledge.^[47] For instance, hidden cues like prosodic contours or distributional patterns in child-directed speech provide the evidentiary richness needed for acquisition, rendering innate hypotheses unnecessary.^[48]

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Mar 31, 2005 · In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition.
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The usage-based theory of language acquisition (Chapter 5)
In this chapter I provide a synoptic account of the usage-based approach to language acquisition, in both its functional and grammatical dimensions.
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[PDF] learning the past tenses of English verbs
Past Tenses of English Verbs. D. E. RUMELHART and J. L. McCLELLAND. Scholars of language and psycholinguistics have been among the first to stress the ...Missing: 1986 | Show results with:1986
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Connectionism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
May 18, 1997 · Another influential early connectionist model was a net trained by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) to predict the past tense of English verbs.
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[PDF] Theory-based Bayesian models of inductive learning and reasoning
Tenenbaum and Xu [35,36] focus on learning names for object-kind concepts, which are typically organized into a tree-structured taxonomy with labels at various ...
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Probabilistic models of language processing and acquisition
Tenenbaum, J.B. et al. (2006) Theory-based Bayesian models of inductive learning and reasoning. Trends Cogn. Sci.... D. Jurafsky. Pragmatics and ...
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(PDF) Word Learning as Bayesian Inference - ResearchGate
Oct 2, 2025 · The authors present a Bayesian framework for understanding how adults and children learn the meanings of words.