The Difficulty of the Baldwinian Account of Linguistic Innateness

摘要

Turkel [16] studies a computational model in which agents try to establish communication. It is observed that over the course of evolution, initial plasticity is significantly nativised. This result supports the idea that innate language knowledge is explained by the Baldwin effect [2][14]. A more biologically plausible computational model, however, reveals the result is unsatisfactory. Implications of this new representation system in language evolution are discussed with a consideration of the Baldwin effect.