The poverty of the stimulus explained by the Nativist theory and the Connectionist paradigm

Resumo

The topic of this paper was initially theorized by Plato in one of his dialogues, Meno. The problem concerns the process of learning which a child goes through during their development. Plato questions how a child can produce complex structures being exposed to the environment for a short period; and it is called as the poverty of the stimulus or Plato’s problem. This monograph was done through researches based on two main paradigms about language learning: Nativism and Connectionism paradigms. While Nativist hypothesis makes use of abductive theory and believes on the existence of a language acquisition device which contains the rules common to all languages; Connectionist paradigm explains it through findings of neuroscience. Instead of claiming that we are born with a device, Connectionist researchers state that we learn through the construction of networks and maturation of the brain. As a result, Connectionism is able to answer more questions about the poverty of the stimulus than Nativism. Having computational networks as its main instrument, the Connectionist paradigm has a larger area for further studies since technology is evolving dayby-day. Keywords: Nativism. Connectionism. Poverty of Stimulus.