Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Early foreign language (FL) programmes have grown rapidly worldwide in the past two decades, resting on the assumption that "earlier is better" for learning a FL. However, the majority of empirical studies that investigated the "earlier is better" hypothesis were conducted in naturalistic immersion contexts. Given the…

Language generativity can be described as the ability to produce sentences never before said, and to understand sentences never before heard. One process often cited as underlying language generativity is response generalization. However, though the latter seems to promise a technical understanding of the former at a process level, an…

A discussion of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics focuses on the theories and recent publications of David Lightfoot and Roger Lass. The author's approaches to language change and language study are examined and compared. (MSE)

Caution should be taken in viewing previous research indicating that negative evidence, a special type of error correction to eliminate overgeneralizations, could be crucial to second-language learning, because the underlying theories adopted for that research possibly could be flawed. (10 references) (CB)

Examines Krashen's Monitor hypothesis (claiming that no interface exists between acquisition and learning) and finds it inadequate due to the over-restrictive conditions necessary for its use. Alternative acquisition theories and ways in which to monitor under less restrictive conditions are also examined, and a communicative trigger is proposed…