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NEWS FLASH—HUME STILL DEAD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2002

Lynn Eubank  and
Kevin R. Gregg
Lynn Eubank
Affiliation:
University of North Texas Lynn Eubank, P.O. Box 520, Angel Fire, NM 87710; e-mail: [email protected].
Kevin R. Gregg
Affiliation:
St. Andrew's University
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Extract

Ellis refers to a wide range of data supporting the uncontroversial claim that there are frequency effects in linguistic and other behavior. He further resurrects the long-discredited claim that language acquisition consists of frequency-based abstraction of regularities from input. What he fails to do is to show how the former claim leads to the latter, or indeed to show any evidence for this claim. Ellis ignores fundamental and well-known problems—the poverty of the stimulus, cases of instantaneous acquisition, evidence for innate knowledge, evidence that even children regularly ignore perceptual input, the compositionality of concepts, and the systematicity of language—that make his frequency-based account of acquisition a nonstarter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 2002 , pp. 237 - 247
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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