The poverty of the stimulus Chomsky XXXXXXXXXXput forth a number of arguments against B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist theory of language acquisition. One argument rested upon what Chomsky has called the...

The poverty of the stimulus Chomsky (1959) put forth a number of arguments against B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist theory of language acquisition. One argument rested upon what Chomsky has called the ‘poverty of the stimulus’: the idea that children are able to produce grammatical structures that they have not been exposed to sufficient data to acquire by imitation. How might the cognitive model account for Chomsky’s observation?