Abstract
The classic evidence for linguistic nativism is based on the argument from the poverty of stimulus: children master principles of amazing intricacy in the absence of relevant experience. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate experimentally that second language acquisition provides comparable evidence for the existence of inborn linguistic principles.
The phenomenon used in this study involves case particle deletion in Japanese, which is possible in direct objects but not subjects — an asymmetry that follows from the Empty Category Principle (ECP), an innate grammatical principle. The results of my experiment show that English-speaking adult learners of Japanese are able to make this contrast and that this ability must be attributed to knowledge of the ECP rather than to the effects of experience or instruction. Thus, data from second language acquisition provides evidence to support linguistic nativism.
