Passage A
The remarkable speed and uniformity with which children acquire their native language, despite being exposed to fragmented and often grammatically inconsistent speech, poses a profound challenge to empiricist theories of learning. This "poverty of the stimulus" strongly suggests that language acquisition cannot rely solely on general cognitive problem-solving skills. Instead, humans must possess an innate, genetically endowed language acquisition device—a specialized cognitive module containing universal grammatical principles. When children are exposed to a specific language, this innate framework is triggered, allowing them to rapidly map the limited linguistic data they hear onto pre-existing grammatical categories. Thus, the human capacity for language is an independent, highly specialized biological system.
Passage B
Proponents of innate linguistic modules often underestimate the richness of the language environments children are immersed in, as well as the formidable computational power of the developing brain. Recent research in statistical learning demonstrates that infants are exquisitely sensitive to patterns and transitional probabilities in the speech they hear. Through general cognitive mechanisms—such as pattern recognition, associative memory, and social intention-reading—children extract grammatical rules directly from linguistic input without needing pre-programmed grammatical templates. Language, therefore, is not an isolated instinct sequestered in a dedicated neurological module. Rather, it emerges organically from the application of domain-general cognitive processes to the highly structured communicative interactions that characterize human infancy.
Statement: The authors of Passage A and Passage B would most likely disagree over whether domain-general cognitive mechanisms, such as pattern recognition, are sufficient to explain how children acquire grammatical rules.
Answer: Answer