The Connection Between “Wolf Child” Story and “Poverty of Stimulus” Argument

Zhang+Rong

【Abstract】The story of “Wolf Child” is well known， which is connected with “ Poverty of Stimulus ” Argument， and it is just the essay is intended to show.

【Key words】Wolf Child； Poverty of Stimulus Argument

According to Noam Chomsky， language especially the first language is something innate for humans. He thinks that a child can acquire a language even though the language input is too poor. That is to say， children can grasp a rich and complicated language system finally even if they are exposed to a poverty of stimulus about a language， because they always make the “hypotheses” according to their own creations. This is called creative construction hypothesis. But what is the connection between the argument and the story of “wolf child”？ That is what I will talk about in the following passage.

In linguistics， the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language acquisition can be mastered through the relatively limited data available to children learning a language， and therefore this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. Nativists especially represented by Noam Chomsky claim that humans are born with an ability to receive different language input and produce infinite language output in an active way and acquire natural languages over the course of their cognitive development and linguistic maturation. The argument is now generally used to support theories and hypotheses of generative grammar. The term “poverty of the stimulus” was coined by Noam Chomsky in his work Rules and Representations. The argument has long been controversial within the field of linguistics， forming the backbone and support for the theory of universal grammar. Arguments in support of poverty of stimulus are not attempting to appeal to innate principles in exchange for learning rules of universal grammar.

Have you ever heard about the story of “wolf children”？ There are different editions about “wolf children”， among which the most famous one is going like： A priest found by accident two girls who were raised by wolves in India in 1920. The younger one was two years old， and the elder one was about seven or eight years old. But soon after they were taken to human society， the younger one died of diseases. So people tried to teach the survived girl to speak in order to communicate. However， during a long period of about four years， she could only speak some English words and didnt reach the normal intelligence level of an adult. Of course， there are many other reports about wolf children， all of whom have the same performance on learning a language， that is always howling in order to express themselves instead of learning a human language. What do the story and reports show in terms of linguistics， especially language acquisition？

There are two key points that have to be demonstrated here. One is critical period， which means the period of a child from the birth to about six years old. Once it is missed， it is extremely difficult even impossible to acquire a language whether it the first language or the second language. The other is that one should be given a suitable language learning environment to learn languages. That is to say， there has to be enough language input from the outside and continuous stimulus， or the children can hardly acquire a language. In some way， the story of “wolf children” is contradictory with the poverty of stimulus argument. In other words， the argument of poverty of stimulus coined by Noam Chomsky is not that perfect， and as far as Im concerned， in fact， there is not any perfect theory in the world at all.

References：

[1]Parissa Zohari（2004.4）.The Special Individualized Program.Degree of Master of Arts.

[2]Rod Ellis（1985）Understanding Second Language Acquisition， Oxford University Press：190-214.

[3]楊小璐.關于刺激貧乏論的爭論[J].外語教學與研究，2004.3.