Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-v2bm5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T05:34:49.474Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2007

Eve Zyzik
Eve Zyzik
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION. Geoffrey Sampson. New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii + 224. $130 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This volume, a revised version of Sampson's (1997) Educating Eve, is an empiricist response to linguistic nativism. Accordingly, the volumes's primary objective is to challenge the view that there is an innate component specifically responsible for the human linguistic capacity. This new edition presents insights from corpus linguistics, which are used to refute the original poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments. The introductory chapter gives a historical overview of the nativist doctrine by distinguishing between the original writings of Chomsky and present-day nativists such as Bickerton and Pinker. In this chapter, Sampson also introduces his view of language acquisition as a hypothesis-testing interplay between the learner and the environment, ideas that he attributes to Popper.

Type
REVIEWS
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 134 - 136
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

DeKeyser, R. (2000). The robustness of critical period effects in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 499–533.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1998). Models of the emergence of language. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 199–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2004). A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 31, 883–914.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Grady, W. (2005). Syntactic carpentry: An emergentist approach to syntax. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sampson, G. (1997). Educating Eve. New York: Continuum.